


Anabasis

by assuwatar



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Ancient History RPF
Genre: Comedy, Death, Gen, MC is accidentally named after my favourite rock band, Religion, generally not treated very seriously, graphic depictions of grad school, is a major theme but not in a sad way, one F/F relationship but it's a surprise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22894159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/assuwatar/pseuds/assuwatar
Summary: Prometheus decides to bring back the worthiest of the Dead to guide the Living. An overworked PhD student is left to deal with the fallout.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Polemokrateia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polemokrateia/gifts).



> Dedicated to a dear friend of mine, who provided several bits of inspiration for this story. I hope you enjoy this unholy offspring of Aristophanes' Frogs and Lucian's Prometheus ;)

Prometheus hadn’t stolen anything in a long time – just about a million years, to be precise. In fact, he had spent most of those million years having something stolen from him, namely, his liver, and worse, by a bird with no flair or panache whatsoever in doing it. Day after day, it had been the same old transaction: a flutter of wings, some pecking, a crude gulp, and that was it. He would’ve been bored to Hades if it hadn’t been for the excruciating pain.

Then that son of Zeus had broken his chains and claimed Prometheus was forgiven. For the next few millennia, it had been strict parole and the threat that if he so much as got a toe out of line, he would be sent downstairs and tied next to Ixion on that burning wheel. Something about a fitting punishment for the Fire Thief. Prometheus wasn’t worried. Instead, he waited his time, waited until the Olympians were busy with the mortals and their mischief, their tools growing ever more powerful, their wars growing ever greater. Then they forgot about him. Then he struck.

Twirling his new possession in his hands, he grinned at how easy it had been. Despite their show of suspicion, nobody had expected him to actually follow through on a plan. Not again. Not when it had already cost him so much.

But, well, he had done it for a reason. Unlike certain other Gods, Prometheus had never stolen anything just for the fun of it – of course, the stealing itself had to be stylishly executed, there was no denying that, but there also needed to be a good cause behind it. And this time, there certainly was one. Maybe more than ever.

Steadying the rod in his right hand, he made his way further down the path. Mud squelched under his sandals. Somewhere far ahead, he could hear the lapping of water on stones, and he paused for a moment to listen for the sound of oars. Nothing – but that was no guarantee. The old boatman had a way of getting around quietly. Most things here did. Prometheus would need to be on high alert if he was to get away with this without being seen.

He took two more steps, then stopped. Well, that failed sooner than expected.

‘So,’ said the silhouette walking out of the darkness, ‘what brings you here, Fire Thief?’

Prometheus kept a straight face.

‘None of your business, Trickster.’

Hermes raised his eyebrows.

‘Trickster? Me? I’m at work as an honest psychopomp, thank you very much, and you’re on my path. My path, my business.’

Prometheus sighed dramatically.

‘Fine. I tried to steal Zeus’ lightning bolt, I got caught, now I’m on my way to join Ixion. I’m just incorrigible, aren’t I? Anyway, I should be on my way.’

Hermes let out a peal of laughter. It echoed against the rocks, spreading out like something trying to escape, until the darkness swallowed it up. The Olympian leaned against a stalagmite. He wiped his eyes.

‘Good one, Fire Thief. I’ll have to share it with the poets.’

Prometheus bit his lip against a curse. He should’ve known the Lord of Lies wouldn’t be fooled – in this, the two of them were just too similar. Sometimes he thought they might have been friends, if circumstances had been different. Circumstances meaning, of course, the fact that it was Hermes himself who had chained Prometheus to the mountain to have his liver tritely eaten. Not exactly the best starting point for a friendship.

‘Nice rod you have, by the way,’ said Hermes. ‘I don’t suppose my nephew gave it to you willingly?’

‘I don’t suppose you would believe me if I said yes?’

‘Touché.’ He flicked a golden hair out of his face. ‘Where’s the snake?’

‘Hiding in my sleeve.’

‘You let him up there?’

‘He’s afraid of the dark.’

Hermes laughed again. ‘Well, Fire Thief, it seems what they say about you is true. You really are too kind for your own good.’ He paused. ‘So what are you going to do with it?’

Prometheus stayed silent, watching him warily.

‘Oh, come on. You’re not going to leave me out of a good heist, are you?’

‘You know I can’t trust you, son of Zeus.’

Hermes snorted.

‘Son of Zeus this, Olympian that, as if any of those should dictate how I behave. You forget I’m the one who crosses boundaries.’ He glanced up. ‘Anyway, my father can’t hear us here. Nobody can. We’re just out of earshot of both sides. So don’t be shy. Spill the beans.’

‘I thought you were an honest psychopomp.’

‘Only when it suits me. By Zeus, Fire Thief, where’s your sense of humour? Did the eagle eat that too?’

Against his will, Prometheus smiled. They really did have too much in common.

‘Swear by the Styx that you won’t tattle,’ he said.

‘I swear it. So?’

‘I’m going to bring back the Dead.’

Hermes blinked. For a heartbeat, his confidence was gone, and he looked genuinely startled. Then he relaxed back against the stalagmite.

‘Nice one. What’s next, putting out the sun? Overthrowing Zeus?’

‘I’m serious. I’m bringing back the Dead.’ He tapped the end of the rod. ‘Well, not all of them. Only the worthiest.’

‘So they can improve the world, I suppose?’

‘Why else? You’ve seen where the mortals are headed these days. Some of the Gods are minded to wipe them out completely. Just yesterday I heard Enki and Poseidon whispering something about rising sea levels. Telepinu’s temper is getting shorter, too. I’ve even heard Odin talking about Ragnarøk.’

‘And you don’t think you might be at fault for that, Fire Thief? Just a little bit? Giving them the means to burn and bomb and all that?’

‘That’s in the past. The point is to help them now, before they leave us no choice. To bring back a few of the wisest to guide them along a better path.’

‘How noble. I see you’ve been reading Aristophanes.’

Prometheus frowned. ‘Who?’

‘Aristophanes. Athenian playwright. Does _brekekekex koax koax_ ring a bell?’

‘No?’

‘Ah well. Ask Dionysos next time you see him. Anyway, back to the subject. Who are we bringing back?’

After so much planning done on Prometheus’ own, it was strange to hear Hermes talk in the plural – and not entirely reassuring, either. But he had sworn the oath of the Gods, on the Styx itself, and that was not something even the Trickster and Leader of Thieves could wiggle out of. Prometheus’ scheme was safe. Presumably. For now.

‘It should be done carefully,’ he said. ‘The first person to be brought back should not draw attention to themselves, or someone on Olympos will notice. More impactful people can be picked later, but until I’m sure everything is working well, I want to start small.’

‘So no Alexandros the Great, then.’

‘Nobody with Great in their name.’

‘How about a philosopher, then? I’ve heard Sokrates was good at making people think.’

‘You must be joking. That man stuck out like a sore thumb wherever he went. Even I noticed him, and I wasn’t even allowed to leave Olympos at the time.’

Hermes scoffed. ‘An orator, maybe?’

‘They talk too loudly.’

‘A poet?’

Prometheus scratched his chin with the end of the rod. ‘That could work. Poets are usually good people. We would need a smart one, able to survive in difficult circumstances –’

‘Like an exile to Syrakousai?’

‘That sounds promising.’

‘Say no more.’ Hermes winked. ‘I have just the person for you. Give me the rod and I will fetch her.’

Prometheus clasped the rod tighter, taking a step back. The snake squirmed in his sleeve.

‘I’ll keep it, thank you.’

‘It was worth a try. I’ll meet you on the outskirts of the asphodel meadow, then. Near the border with Ištanu’s meadow would be best, my uncle doesn’t keep such a close watch on that side.’ He skipped down the path, his sandals glimmering in the half-light, then stopped and turned around. ‘Don’t forget to bring clay, either. Our poet will need a new body.’

Prometheus nodded, hands still tight on the rod. Hermes smirked back.

‘Lighten up, Fire Thief. No time for regrets now. The game is on.’

Before Prometheus could answer, he danced away. With a sigh, the Titan knelt and started scooping up mud, moulding it into as good a human shape as he could in the gloom. He would perfect it once they were closer to the surface – provided Hermes didn’t betray him and everything went according to plan. Provided the rod of Asklepios worked and they could bring the mortal back to life. Provided none of the other Gods noticed.

The odds were steep, but then, Prometheus had always gone up against steep odds. And no matter how apprehensive he was, he couldn’t help but feel some of the old exhilaration creep in. If he could pull this off, it might just be his greatest achievement yet.

Hermes was right. The game was on.

*

Elza took another sip of tea and glanced at her watch. It was just before 11pm – far past the time she should’ve left her office. Any longer and she would miss her last bus home. She scribbled a few words on a post-it note, trying not to look at the pile of bookmarked and highlighted books next to her. So much research still left to do. But it wouldn’t do her much good to work on it until she was forced to sleep here, not after last time, when she’d been woken up by a security guard who saw her light on and came to investigate. I’m not a robber, she’d tried to explain in tired, broken German. Just a PhD student. She’d gotten away with it in the end, but still. Best not to risk it.

She gulped down the last of her tea, swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and made for the door. The hallway lights blinked on as she stepped out. The staircase curled down and down into darkness. As if leading to the Underworld, she thought, then shook her head. There was her thesis getting to her again. Four months of reading about _katabaseis_ and chthonic rituals and she was seeing the Dead everywhere. Another few years of this and she’d be completely crazy.

Dropping her keys into her bag, she pulled out her phone and popped in an earbud. Her favourite song started playing as she walked down the stairs. This would keep her going until she got home, at least. Then she would have a quick snack, another cup of tea and a book, a few hours of sleep, and then back to the office it would be. And repeat.

Something crashed loudly. Elza froze. She paused the music, took out her earbud. Silence.

‘Hello?’ she said.

No answer. She walked down one step, then another. Maybe the security guard had dropped by and bumped into something in the darkness. Or maybe someone was breaking in. Not that anyone in their right mind would want to burgle the Classical Institute, but you never knew. Maybe there were burglars out there with an inordinate passion for Homer.

‘Hello?’ Elza called out again.

Still no answer. She leaned over the side of the staircase. The basement lights were on – that meant they had sensed movement. There definitely was someone down there. Taking a deep breath, she tiptoed down to the landing. She dialled the police and hovered her thumb above the phone icon. Better be ready, just in case. Then she stepped forward into the basement.

One of the shelves had fallen over, and old books and archived documents were spilled all over the floor. This would take ages to tidy up. Worse were the muddy footprints all over the tiles and far too many of the papers. Whoever was here had no respect for history. And, apparently, was barefoot. Elza frowned. Who even did that?

‘Khaire,’ said a voice from behind her.

She spun around. A woman was standing there, stark naked, arms crossed over her chest, dark curls falling down her back. She jumped at Elza’s sudden movement. They stared at each other, both catching their breath.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Elza spluttered. ‘And what on Earth do you think you’re doing here?’

The woman started blathering in a foreign language, raising her hands defensively. Her words sounded strangely familiar, though Elza couldn’t figure out why – it wasn’t a language she spoke. Or remembered hearing, even.

‘Slow down,’ she interrupted. ‘Do you speak German?’

The woman gave her a blank stare. Apparently not.

‘English?’ Elza tried again, switching languages. ‘No? All right, po polsku? Też nie, dobrze. Français? Vous parlez français?’

She tapped her lips and pointed at the woman, trying to get the message across. Something changed in the woman’s face.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hellenika.’

Greek. Of course. That explained why Elza could recognise it – after so many years studying its ancient dialects, some of it must have lodged itself permanently in her memory. She scrambled for words.

‘Can you… talk slowly?’

The woman let out something that sounded like an apology. ‘I do not know where I am,’ she enunciated. ‘Can you help me?’

Elza furrowed her brow. As if this wasn’t weird enough, it had just gotten weirder. The woman was speaking Aeolic Greek. _Ancient_ Aeolic Greek. She’d read enough Sappho to know it.

A naked woman speaking Ancient Greek in the university basement at 11pm. This was fine. Totally fine.

‘We are at…’ She didn’t know a word for university. ‘At the academy. School. How did you, uh, come here?’

‘I do not know,’ said the woman. She pointed at the wall where the fallen shelf had been. ‘I came through there. I do not remember anything before that.’

A naked woman with amnesia. This was even better. Not.

‘Do you remember who you are?’ Elza asked. ‘Your name?’

The woman nodded. ‘Sappho, daughter of Scamandronymus.’

Slowly, Elza lifted a hand and pinched the bridge of her nose. She was crazy. She’d gone crazy. She’d worked on her thesis so much that it had driven her to madness.

‘This is a joke,’ she said. ‘You are joking. This isn’t real.’ She reverted to German. ‘Ha, ha, very funny. You got me. You can stop playing now. Is this a hidden camera prank?’ She looked around the basement. ‘It’s over, you can come out now. I figured it out.’

‘I do not understand you,’ said the woman claiming to be an archaic Greek poet, though of course that wasn’t possible, because Sappho was dead and dead people didn’t come back, especially not two thousand years later and especially not in a university basement in Germany. ‘I am telling the truth. I do not know what happened either.’

‘Okay,’ said Elza. ‘So you are Sappho.’

‘Yes.’

‘From Lesbos.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sappho the poet.’

‘Yes.’

‘Show it to me.’ She turned her phone screen back on and typed a few words into Google. A page displaying fragments of Sappho’s poetry opened. She started to read in Greek. ‘Some say an army of horsemen, other say foot soldiers, still others say a fleet is the finest thing on the dark earth. I say…’

‘… it is whatever one loves.’ Sappho smiled, then sang on. ‘Everyone can understand this. Consider that Helen, far surpassing the beauty of mortals, left behind the best man of all to sail away to Troy.’

Elza rubbed her temples. From what she knew of Ancient Greek music, this sounded like it. Still, this could be a joke. An extremely elaborate prank. By a person with a very questionable sense of humour.

Except Sappho was filling in the broken lines. And it made sense.

‘Fine,’ Elza interrupted. ‘Now this one. Love shook my heart like a wind falling on oaks on a mountain…’

‘Oh, that one is sad.’ Sappho gave a weak smile, as if apologising. ‘But as you wish. Love shook my heart…’

She sang in another, more foreign tonality this time. Elza listened in a daze. There was no way someone could’ve faked this. This really was Sappho. She was being given a private performance of one of the most famous Greek poets’ lost verses.

‘But you’re supposed to be dead…’ she murmured.

Sappho cut off her singing.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Nothing. I, uh… We need to leave. Someone cannot find us here. Do you have –’ what was the Greek word for clothes again? – ‘a chiton?’

‘I have nothing.’

‘Take this.’ Elza slipped off her sweatshirt, then pointed at her hips. ‘Tie it around here. Take this as well,’ she added, placing her jacket on Sappho’s shoulders. It looked strange, and Elza would be cold in only a t-shirt, but it was the best she could do. Lucky her apartment wasn’t too far away.

Sappho followed her to the ground floor, staring at the lights that clicked on above them. Something told Elza that she would have a lot of explaining to do later. Emphasis on later. Right now, what mattered was getting home and putting this two thousand-year-old woman somewhere where she couldn’t be harmed, where she couldn’t do any harm, and where Elza could figure out just what, exactly, was going on. Or, alternatively, wake up to realise it was all a dream. Now that would make sense.

She put her back to the entrance door, ready to push, and turned towards Sappho.

‘There are things outside you do not know. Do not be afraid. Just follow me. Do you understand?’

Sappho nodded.

‘What kind of things are there?’

Elza pushed the door open. A car hurtled past just then, speakers blaring, and Sappho yelped and jumped back. Elza grabbed her wrist.

‘Things like that. They are not dangerous if you do as I say. Come.’

Sappho shuffled along the footpath to the bus stop, eyes wide, heart pounding so hard Elza could feel its pulse against her hand. She glared at anyone who looked at them for too long. They were just two women on their way back from a night out. Yes, of course her friend was drunk. No, everything was fine. Move along. Nothing to see here.

She skipped using the lift in her building, deciding they’d had enough modern technology for now, and led Sappho up six flights of stairs to her door. She opened the lock and switched on the lights. Sappho stayed standing on the ‘home, sweet home’ mat, eyes still wide, sweatshirt slipping off her hips, arms wrapped around her waist and toes curled like she was afraid of taking even one more step. Elza didn’t know whether to feel sorry for her or to laugh. For all her confusion, the woman must have it ten times worse. What a change of scenery this must be from Lesbos – or wherever Sappho had come from.

‘Do you want something to eat? To drink?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘All right.’ Elza filled the jug and put it on to boil. She would have a cup of tea, at least. ‘Tell me if you need something. There are chitons in the, uh, wall? You can sleep in my bed.’

Sappho nodded, thanking her again, and edged towards the bedroom. Elza waited for the door to close before pulling out her phone. She dialled her best friend’s number. It was just past midnight. Hopefully Claudia was still awake.

The dialling tone cut off.

‘Elza? What’s up?’

She pressed the phone to her ear. ‘I’m not sure how to explain,’ she whispered.

‘What happened? Are you okay?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She glanced at her bedroom door. ‘There’s just…’

‘What?’

‘Sappho.’

‘What do you mean, Sappho?’

‘She’s here. I found her in the institute’s basement.’

There was a silence.

‘Look, Claudia, I know it sounds crazy –’

‘Sounds? You’re losing your mind, Elza.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that you’re phoning me in the middle of the night and telling me you found a dead poet in the basement. Honestly, I’m a bit concerned.’

Elza sighed, tapping her finger against the kitchen counter. To be fair, she felt the same way.

‘Just get some rest, okay? You’ve been working too hard. Take tomorrow off. Go to the park and sketch some trees or something. Stop thinking about Ancient Greek stuff for a while, and maybe you’ll stop seeing Ancient Greeks wherever you go.’

‘Yeah.’ The water had boiled. She poured it into a mug and dipped in a teabag. ‘You’re right. I’ll tell the institute I’m not coming in tomorrow.’

‘Good. Get some sleep now.’

‘Yeah. Good night, Claudia.’

‘Good night.’

There was a click. Elza dropped her phone into her pocket. She sipped at her tea, wondering if she should sneak into her bedroom and see if it was empty or if Sappho really was still there. In the end, she just took a blanket from the cupboard and lay down on the sofa. Sappho or no Sappho, she would deal with it tomorrow. Claudia was right. She needed rest.

She dreamed of strange songs, just too clear for her brain to have made them up.


	2. Chapter 2

Elza woke up to the sound of music and screaming.

She leapt up from the sofa and raced to the kitchen, where her favourite rock band was blaring at full volume. Sappho, still very much real, was standing by the loudspeakers in one of Elza’s summer dresses, clutching her chest. She must have bumped the play button by accident. Elza unplugged the iPod and switched it off. Sappho stayed frozen.

‘Are they gone?’ she spluttered.

‘Who?’

‘The men.’

‘What me… Oh.’ She meant the band. ‘Yes, they are gone.’

‘How did they get in there?’

‘They were not inside, they…’ Elza rubbed her temples. It was too early in the morning to explain sound recordings in Ancient Greek. ‘It is like an image. A painting, but with music. Are you hungry?’

‘I would gladly have some bread.’

Elza cut her a few slices, then rummaged through the fridge until she found a jar of olives. She opened it and handed it to Sappho.

‘Try these too, they are from Greece.’

The poet turned the jar around in her hands, frowning at the label.

‘What a strange dialect.’

‘It is modern Greek.’

‘Modern?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Elza propped herself against the counter and helped herself to a slice of bread. ‘We need to talk about some things. A lot of things. A hell of a lot of things,’ she muttered to herself in Polish. Stating it in her native language felt reassuring. It reminded her she hadn’t completely lost touch with reality yet.

Sappho chewed an olive, waiting.

‘So…’ There was no easy way to start. ‘Well, you are dead.’

‘I am what?’

‘Dead. Very dead. Two thousand years dead. Deceased, perished, whatever the word in Aeolic Greek is.’

‘But I’m alive.’

‘Exactly. That is the problem.’

Sappho scowled.

‘Problem? I would rather be the last of the Living than the first of the Dead.’

‘But you are not! It is not right. You lived two thousand years ago, you should be…’ Elza was losing her words. She grabbed her phone, typing Sappho’s name into the search bar. She loaded the Wikipedia page in Greek. She thrust it into the poet’s hands. ‘Read.’

Silence. Elza nibbled her bread. Sappho’s eyes darted back and forth across the page.

Then she laughed.

‘Kerkylas of Andros? Really?’

‘I never believed it,’ Elza shrugged.

‘Kerkylas… of Andros.’ Sappho’s shoulders were shaking. Elza wondered how much of it was genuine amusement and how much was nervous laughter. ‘Kerkylas, my husband.’

‘It is just a theory.’

‘It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.’

Elza waited for her to calm down.

‘So now you understand me?’ she said at last.

‘Understand what?’

‘That you should not be here.’

Sappho handed the phone back and pulled on a dark curl thoughtfully.

‘It’s strange. I don’t remember dying.’

‘What do you remember?’

‘I… I’m not sure. I remember my life on Lesbos, the exile… There was a strange place, now that I think of it. Dark like a cave and full of whispering things. It feels like a dream I can barely grasp now that I’m awake. There was a river, but it hardly made a sound…’

‘Lethe,’ said Elza. ‘Or the Styx.’ After reading so many descriptions of the Greek Underworld, she could recognise this one instantly. Her scholar’s mind picked up on the similarities with Homer – he mentioned whispers too, and souls going down with a weak scream. She’d have to see if there were any parallels in Sappho’s extant poetry. If there were, she could dig further into the question of transmission, which would add a whole new dimension to her thesis –

And which was completely absurd. Here was a woman, back from the Dead and telling her about it. And here was Elza, thinking about her PhD.

‘If you came from the asphodel meadow,’ she said, ‘then it is necessary to send you back. Something wrong happened for you to be here. We must make it right.’

‘Or I came thanks to the gods’ favour. Think about it,’ Sappho said, reaching for another olive. ‘This cannot have happened without the help of some deity. Maybe there is a purpose to this.’

Elza stuffed what was left of the loaf back into the bread bin.

‘Purpose or no purpose, this is not how things should be. I study the Dead every day. People go down. Not up. Well, there was Orpheus but I am not Orpheus and you are not Eurydice and you _are_ going back down, whether you and the gods like it or not.’

‘All right.’ Sappho leaned against the wall. ‘How?’

‘I said I study this. I will find a way.’

‘And if you do not?’

Elza wished she knew how to say ‘shut up’ in Ancient Greek. ‘I will. Listen. We will try like this. Archeology shows that some places were seen as doors to the Underworld. Often these places went under the ground, and I found you under the ground of the academy. You came at night, too, and night is a good time for chthonic things. So, we will return tonight. And you will try to go back.’

Sappho raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Good. For the time being, at least, Elza wanted to believe this plan, however flimsy, would work. That tomorrow she could go back to being a normal, overworked PhD student who didn’t spend her mornings explaining to dead Greeks why they were dead.

Or, more likely, a lifetime patient in a mental hospital.

‘Before tonight,’ Elza said, ‘is there something you want to do?’ If Sappho was here for the day, might as well give her a tour of the 21st century.

‘The chariot we rode yesterday,’ she said, ‘what was it?’

‘Oh. It is called an autobus. The word means it is a chariot that moves on its own. People, uh, use it together to travel in the city.’

‘Can we ride it again?’

Elza resisted the urge to sigh. Sappho had spent yesterday’s ride with one white-knuckled hand clasping her seat, the other covering an ear.

‘Are you sure? You… did not seem very happy.’

‘It was strange at first. But do you know the feeling of standing on a cliff as the wind blows, or seeing the face of whoever you love? It feels like dying, but it is in those moments we are most alive.’

And Sappho, who had been dead for millennia, wanted a moment of life. Of course.

‘Fine,’ said Elza. ‘I will find you some warmer –’ what _was_ the word for clothes? – ‘chitons.’

They stepped out of the building a few minutes later, into the bustle of a Thursday morning. Men in suits hurried down the street, holding briefcases and cellphones, and Sappho stared at them open-mouthed as she tripped after Elza. Even with her jeans cuffed up, they were still too long. She really was, as ancient sources said, small and dark.

As luck would have it, the bus had a window seat free, and Sappho spent the ride with her forehead pressed to the glass, watching the streets. Every now and then, she pointed at something and Elza would explain – that’s a bicycle, those are streetlights, that’s a church, no, there are no temples, that’s plastic, that’s a chihuahua, that’s an opera house, yes, it has Greek columns, I told you there are no temples. The poet’s fear was wearing off now, replaced by wonder. It almost felt like babysitting a toddler.

‘We rode so fast,’ she said breathlessly as they got off outside the park. ‘How could the autobus do that?’

‘Good question,’ said Elza, who knew there was a reason she should’ve paid attention in physics class instead of doodling Homeric heroes in the margins. She made her way to the cafe by the park entrance. ‘Are you thirsty?’

Sappho nodded, her eyes on a busker playing the guitar a few metres away. She seemed to have already forgotten her question. Turning away, Elza scanned the menu: tea, coffee, hot chocolate – Sappho didn’t know what any of those were. Time to find yet another explanation.

‘Do you want a drink that gives you energy, a drink that relaxes you, or a sweet drink?’

‘Sweet,’ said Sappho, and smiled. ‘Sweeter than the sound of a lyre.’

‘I will buy it.’ Elza gestured towards the terrace. ‘Find a place to sit. I will come back soon.’

Sappho nodded, her eyes still on the busker. All things considered, Elza should’ve expected what she found when she walked out of the cafe a few minutes later, with a herbal tea in one hand and a hot chocolate in the other: at some point, the poet – though of course, in Ancient Greece, that was the same thing as a musician – had wandered over to the guitar player, who had handed over his instrument and was now showing her some basic chords. Sappho laughed as she strummed, the language barrier not stopping her from chatting. She sang the beginning of a melody and tried to find the notes on the guitar. The man took it back and found them for her. She sang along.

Elza put the drinks down on a table, pulled out her phone and started filming. If Claudia hadn’t believed her last night, she would when she saw this. She sent the clip with the caption ‘Sappho busking’, then leaned back to listen.

When the song ended, a dozen people dropped money into the guitar player’s case, and he and Sappho split it evenly before she made her way back to Elza. They counted the money on the table. A single song had earned the poet almost twenty euros.

‘Well,’ said Elza, ‘now we know that modern people like Ancient Greek music too.’

They sat on the terrace for another half an hour while Sappho sipped her hot chocolate before deciding it was too sweet, then strolled through the park and along the river. They had lunch in a Biergarten, where Sappho eyed Elza’s potato chips suspiciously. By the time the sun set, around 6pm, they had walked through most of the city, taken another bus, visited an art gallery, and won the hearts of two more buskers, one of which asked for Sappho’s number before Elza awkwardly pulled her away. If there ever was an impossible romance, this was it.

All the lights at the Classical institute were off when the women reached the building. Elza unlocked the door and ushered Sappho in. The lights blinked on. Sappho jumped; one day hadn’t been enough to accustom her to electricity, let alone the motion-sensitive type. Elza took her by the elbow and led her downstairs. Best they got this over and done with quickly.

The basement had been tidied up during the day, and the fallen shelf and most of the archives were back in place. Elza cleared a few documents away so she could touch the wall. It felt like, well, a wall.

‘Push on it,’ she said to Sappho.

The poet complied. Nothing happened.

‘Do you remember how you crossed?’ Elza asked.

Sappho shrugged.

‘I just… walked through. And –’ she added something in Greek, which Elza didn’t understand but assumed was something along the lines of ‘crashed head first into the shelf’.

Elza knocked her palm against the plaster. The door had to work somehow. Not to mention that Hades, if the myths were true, was not too fond of his subjects leaving his realm. If anything, it had to be easier for them to go down than up.

‘Maybe you should say a prayer?’

Sappho recited a few words, calling on Hermes psychopomp, then pressed against the wall again. Still nothing. She leaned her head against the shelf with a frown.

‘The gods are not with us,’ she said.

‘The gods will damn well be with us,’ Elza muttered in Polish and gave the wall a shove, harder this time. ‘Ouch.’

‘If it is fated, we cannot change it.’

‘Nobody is fated to return from death. The Dead walk because they died young, because they were not buried, or because they were summoned with blood. That is all.’

‘Yet I am here.’

Elza glanced at Sappho. Admittedly, she didn’t resemble any of the ghosts Homer, Aeschylus or Lucian described: she was tangible, and however a soul fluttering about like a bird looked, she didn’t look like that. By all accounts, she was a normal, living woman. Her breath formed clouds in the cold basement. One of her curls was caught in the zip of her coat.

Elza could kill her.

She suppressed the thought as soon as it came to her. However weird the situation was, morals were still morals. And she couldn’t kill Sappho. That wasn’t exactly something you lived with. ‘Yeah, history’s most famous female poet paid me a visit, so I murdered her to make her go away.’

There had to be another way. But however much she wracked her brain, she couldn’t think of one.

‘Come,’ she finally sighed. ‘We will go home. I will read tomorrow, and we will return in the evening.’

Because Sappho would go back, of course. It was just a matter of time until Elza found the right reference to guide her. Something in Aristophanes, maybe, or one of the romances. She’d been putting off studying those for a while – Homer was a more interesting place to start on the topic. Well, it looked like her focus was about to change.

She checked the time on her phone as they left the building. She had a message from Claudia. ‘Pretty accurate recreation of ancient music, but I doubt Sappho would ever wear jeans,’ it read, with a laughing emoji instead of a full stop. Elza sighed and put her phone away.

At least Sappho was good at busking. That would keep her busy until things got back in order.


	3. Chapter 3

‘Our poet is doing well,’ said Hermes, sitting down on a rock next to Prometheus, feet dangling above the Styx. ‘She’s been quick to adapt. Less culture shock than I expected.’

He held out his caduceus and let it touch the tip of the rod Prometheus was holding. The three snakes slithered around each other, flicking their tongues, nudging each other’s heads in greeting. For the last month, that had been Prometheus and Hermes’ handshake. There was still a strong wariness between them – or rather, Prometheus was still strongly wary of Hermes; who knew what the Trickster was thinking – but neither side could deny they were partners now. Not partners in crime, of course. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, a crime. They were just partners in somewhat rearranging the order of the world for the benefit of humanity.

‘I’ve been putting a bit of luck on her side,’ said Hermes. ‘Making sure the streets where she sings are busy and passers-by have their wallets full, that sort of thing. I hope you appreciate it.’

‘I do, I suppose.’

‘You’re welcome.’

He pulled his caduceus away to pet the snakes’ heads. Now alone, Asklepios’ snake curled around the rod tensely, its head perked up to watch the darkness. The poor thing still wasn’t used to the Underworld. Prometheus held out his arm for it to climb into his sleeve.

‘So,’ said Hermes, ‘what’s the point?’

‘What do you mean? You know the point.’

‘No, the point of bringing back a poet. I can’t imagine Sappho will lead an army or get involved in politics. She’s a good singer, true, but how are songs about pretty girls going to save the world?’

Prometheus twirled the rod around in his hands.

‘You feed poets information all the time. You should know what they bring us.’

‘To be honest, I just like spreading stories.’

‘They provide inspiration. They remind mortals that beauty exists. If you’re going to change the world, you need to believe in something worth changing it for.’

‘Ah, yes. Great causes lead mortals to go to great lengths. Lysistrata would agree.’

‘Lysistrata?’

‘By Zeus, you really are out of touch, aren’t you?’

‘And whose fault is that?’

‘Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. I was just executing my father’s orders.’

And my liver, thought Prometheus bitterly. Hermes must view it as a two birds, one stone situation – or rather two Gods, one bird, and an ever-regrowing organ: he’d gotten rid of a rival troublemaker, and simultaneously made sure he himself was on Zeus’ good side after his tricks as a newborn. To be fair, it was smart, and it had worked. The Olympians trusted Hermes far more than they did Prometheus, despite the two of them not being all too different. Prometheus would’ve been proud if the scheme had been his own.

Except he’d been its victim. Which wasn’t exactly appreciated.

‘Why are you helping me?’ he found himself asking. Hermes raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you get out of this, Trickster?’

‘Entertainment?’ Hermes chuckled. ‘An answer to the question: how long will it take for my dear uncle to notice his realm is emptying? A leading role in something straight out of Aristophanes? A justification for my title Friend of Man? Take your pick.’

‘I don’t believe any of those.’

‘That’s a shame. Some of them might be true.’ He picked up a pebble and tossed it into the river. The splash echoed. It sounded like something not meant to be heard. ‘Anyway, who are we bringing back next? Are we moving on to Alexandros the Great yet, or do you intend to stick to poets?’

‘I told you, nobody with Great –’

Something behind them made a noise. Prometheus spun around, interrupting himself. If it was Hades, he was as good as condemned. He wouldn’t even need to be dragged to Olympos for judgement. The Receiver of Many would strap him to Ixion’s wheel right then and there, and that would be his fate for the next million years, or until Zeus finally had a son greater than his father and the whole system was overthrown and started up again.

It wasn’t Hades. A Goddess stood there, dressed in black robes, emanating what Prometheus would’ve called light if it hadn’t been the exact opposite colour. It wasn’t darkness, either – it shone, almost blindingly, and brightened the landscape through its shadow, in a way that could only be described as the antithesis of the sun.

Prometheus knew her at once.

‘Hail, my lady Ištanu,’ said Hermes with a bow.

The Sungoddess of the Netherworld inclined her head in response. Her gaze moved towards the rod in Prometheus’ hand. Instinctively, he tightened his grasp.

‘No need to get defensive,’ said Ištanu. ‘I haven’t come to denounce you.’

Hermes flashed her a grin.

‘Denounce? There’s nothing to denounce here. Just an honest psychopomp and his relative having a rest. It’s a tiring job, working for this pantheon.’

‘The Lord of Lies lives up to his reputation, I see.’

Hermes put on an offended look and opened his mouth to protest. The Sungoddess lifted her eyes to the sky.

‘Come on, don’t be ridiculous. You’ve been hanging around whispering by my meadow for a month. I know what you’re up to.’ She sat down next to Prometheus, cross-legged. ‘I want in.’

‘No,’ said Prometheus.

‘Now that’s unfair.’ She looked straight at him, with eyes like a cat’s. Her irises were pure gold. Prometheus tried not to stare. ‘I love humanity just as much as you do. I’m just as concerned by what’s going on, and I think your plan could help. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to join in?’

‘We have no reason to trust you,’ said Prometheus.

‘Because you two trust each other?’

Prometheus looked at Hermes. Hermes looked at Prometheus.

‘Fair point,’ said Prometheus.

‘We can’t let you in on anything without your word,’ said Hermes. ‘Swear by the binding oath of your pantheon that you’ll keep this entire plan secret.’

Ištanu swore, by all the Gods and mountains and rivers of the land of Ḫattuša. It took a while.

Once she’d finally fallen silent, Prometheus loosened his grip on Asklepios’ rod. So now there were three of them in on the scheme. The more the merrier, apparently. Or the more likely to get caught. Oath or no oath, he didn’t know what Ištanu was capable of, and he knew exactly what Hermes was capable of, which was worse.

‘So,’ said the Olympian, ‘back to the subject. Who are we bringing back?’

Ištanu held up a hand.

‘May I offer a suggestion?’

‘Go ahead,’ Prometheus sighed, hoping it would be reasonable.

‘It’s within the order of the world that mortals sacrifice to Gods, and Gods are kind to mortals in return. But most mortals these days have forgotten us. They prefer a single God to whom they don’t even give gold and silver, let alone blood.’ She made a face. ‘If our cults were restored, I’ll bet you humanity will live in better harmony with its environment, and our less benevolent siblings will be better disposed towards them too.’

‘Poseidon does get irritable when he’s hungry,’ Hermes offered.

‘You want to resurrect a priest, then,’ said Prometheus. ‘Who?’

‘I have a priest-king of my own who would be well-suited. A deeply devoted man. Had an interest in history and the restoration of old rites.’

‘Can he deal with difficult situations?’ asked Hermes.

‘That, he certainly had experience in.’

‘Can he be discreet when necessary?’ said Prometheus.

‘He was reserved and soft-spoken.’

‘But influential enough to change history?’

‘Of course. He was a successful ruler.’

Prometheus glanced at Hermes, who nodded. It did sound promising. If Sappho was able to give mortals inspiration, this new man could give it a direction, a cause. Next there could be a philosopher or two, maybe politicians to give the movement traction and implement wiser laws, and finally some true leaders. Yes. This could be good.

‘Fetch your priest-king’s soul,’ he said to Ištanu. ‘I will prepare the rest.’

She stood up with a smile and slipped away like dusk. As soon as she was gone, Hermes held out his hand.

‘Hey, Titan, can I do the resurrecting this time?’

Prometheus pulled away.

‘No. The rod is still mine, as is everything else. You both can help, but this remains my project.’

‘No need to save you if you get caught, then,’ Hermes grinned. ‘Got it.’

‘Shut it, Trickster,’ Prometheus said, and he scooped up some clay and started moulding.

*

It was just past midday when Elza’s phone rang. She put her pen behind her ear, remembered too late it was a fountain pen, cursed, hastily rubbed the ink off her cheek, and clicked the answer button in the same movement. She wedged the phone between her head and shoulder, opening a drawer to look for tissues.

‘Elżbieta Janiszewska, yes?’

‘Hello,’ said Sappho’s voice at the other end. She sounded distant, as if she was talking into the wrong end of the phone. Elza had bought her a secondhand Nokia two weeks earlier and shown her how to use it, but she still struggled with everything, except taking selfies, which she revelled in. ‘I am at the academy.’

‘Good,’ said Elza, still going through the drawer. ‘I will come down to meet you soon. Where do you want to eat? By the park or –’

‘It’s not about that,’ said Sappho. ‘When I came in, I heard noise downstairs. There is a man here. A… naked man. I think he came from the same place I did.’

Elza froze. Slowly, she closed the drawer.

‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked. ‘Does he know?’

‘I tried to speak with him, but he speaks a strange language. It sounds like Lydian.’

Elza rubbed her forehead with her free hand. God. If Aeolic Greek was bad, Lydian was ten times worse.

‘Wait there,’ she said. ‘I am coming.’

To hell with the ink stain on her cheek – she grabbed her jacket and a couple of dictionaries off her desk and scrambled down the stairs. Voices came from the basement. A man was standing with his back to the entrance, shivering, wet brown hair dangling over his shoulders and bare feet trailing muddy water. Sappho was holding out her coat to him, trying to explain how to put it on. Elza let out a deep sigh. Why couldn’t whatever was sending these people up at least give them clothes?

Well, if there was anything to be thankful for in this ridiculous situation, all the shelves were still standing. The man must have come through one of the bare sections of the wall.

He turned around when he heard Elza arrive, and gave an awkward bow.

‘I don’t suppose you speak Greek?’ she said.

‘Kuwapi ēšmi?’ said the man. Apparently not.

‘I tried Greek, Lydian, and even a few words of Carian and Phrygian,’ said Sappho. ‘I think he recognised a little, but not enough to understand me.’

The man gave Elza an apologetic smile, as if he’d guessed what they were talking about. Elza felt a tinge of sympathy. He looked about as confused as she was. After all, if he’d fallen through a wall and found himself muddy and naked in a foreign basement, it wasn’t his fault. Presumably. Who knew, really, what was making this happen?

‘Let me try something,’ Elza said. She pointed at the puddles, looking at the man. ‘Wasser?’ she asked in German.

‘Wātar,’ the man nodded.

Elza breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Well, at least we know it’s Indo-European.’ She put down her Hebrew dictionary on the closest shelf. Now to find the specific language. Opening the Latin dictionary, she started to read at random.

‘Ac, amare, asinus, caracalla, filius, geminare…’

No reaction. She put that one down. Sappho twisted a lock of hair around her finger, looking skeptical.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ said Elza in her somewhat improving Greek. ‘I am doing what I can.’

‘If he doesn’t speak a language we know,’ said Sappho, ‘what will we do?’

‘Leave him here,’ Elza said. She was only half joking.

‘Ḫaššuš utneyaš Ḫattušaš ešun,’ said the man. ‘Namma šiuš kišḫaḫat. Kuwapi ešmi?’

Elza frowned. She peered at his face more closely.

‘Wait. Ḫattuša?’

‘Ḫattušaš,’ the man repeated in a better accent.

Elza pinched the bridge of her nose. She knew the word, of course. It had been years since her last Indo-European linguistics class, but she hadn’t forgotten the name of the Hittite capital. Her professor had made sure of that.

So this man was a Hittite. Great. Or rather, absolutely not great at all.

She turned her phone on and typed a few words into Google.

‘Lāman?’ she asked. ‘Your name?’

‘Muršiliš,’ said the man.

She opened Wikipedia, searched for the name, clicked on the first page to come up. Muršili was the name of three Hittite kings. The first had died young – she glanced up and decided that couldn’t be right; this man seemed to be in his forties – and the third was known as Urḫi-Tešup. She read the name out. The man shook his head.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Does this ring a bell? Ḫalpašulupi, Muwatalli, Maššanauzzi, Ḫattušili.’

The man nodded vehemently, saying something in Hittite. Elza switched her phone off. He’d recognised his children’s names – it had to be him. Muršili II. Great King of the Hittites. Dead for – if Wikipedia was to be trusted – three thousand three hundred years.

She put the remaining dictionary down, walked over to the nearest wall, and gave a polite knock.

‘Excuse me,’ she said calmly. ‘You seem to have misplaced something. A king, specifically. He very much does not belong here, I am not equipped to deal with him, and if you could come get him at your earliest convenience, that would be, let’s put it this way, pretty nice.’

Silence. She could feel the two not-dead-dead-people watching her.

‘Please?’ she added.

Still nothing. Well, it was worth a try. She took the coat from Sappho’s hands and put it on Muršili’s shoulders.

Time to find somewhere to stash a Hittite king before her lunch break was over.


	4. Chapter 4

With Muršili led into an empty stall of the men’s bathroom and instructed – in a combination of hand gestures and very approximate Hittite – to stay put, Sappho sent with fifty euros to buy him clothes, and a sandwich hastily bought at the nearest supermarket, Elza sat alone in the institute’s stairwell and took a deep breath. So this was what she was doing, then. Babysitting not one, but two time-travellers. Or zombies. Or whatever they were supposed to be. It sounded like a joke, or the premise to a low-budget comedy series. ‘Tune in this week as our overworked and underpaid PhD student shows His Sun Muršili II how to open a modern door handle!’ She almost laughed.

She considered calling Claudia, but decided against it. Her friend hadn’t taken well to the idea of Sappho being alive, busking on the streets by day and sleeping on a blow-up mattress in Elza’s apartment by night. Whenever Elza mentioned it, Claudia either steered the conversation towards a different subject or gently suggested Elza should see a psychiatrist. Elza didn’t really blame her. She’d considered the same thing.

Frankly, it would’ve been convenient for her to be delusional. It would’ve been simple. A whole lot simpler than restructuring her entire worldview, and worse, her thesis, around the by all accounts real appearance of long-dead kings and poets in her university basement.

‘Study _katabaseis_ and Greek perceptions of the Underworld, they said,’ she mumbled. ‘It will be fun, they said. Nothing weird could come out of that. Yeah, sure.’

She stood up and made her way back upstairs. If anything, she had to do something about the basement situation. She was already too deep into the weirdness herself, but she couldn’t have one of her more impressionable colleagues, or a nervous undergrad student, stumbling into some historical figure while looking for a catalogue of 1870s archeological digs. For one, she didn’t want to be responsible for explaining everything to them. For two, it was best if only one person ended up with lifelong trauma due to this.

Her supervisor’s door was open, and she knocked gently to attract his attention. He looked up from his computer.

‘How’s it going, Elschbeta?’ he said, mispronouncing her name as always. He was the reason she told people to call her Elza – jokes about the snow queen be damned. ‘Anything I can help you with?’

‘I was down in the archives,’ she said. ‘There seems to be some kind of flooding going on. It’s the second time in a month that there’s muddy water all over the floor. I think it’s best if the basement is cordoned off until we can get someone down there to figure out what’s wrong.’

Her supervisor nodded, picking up the phone.

‘I’ll get onto it. Thanks.’

She gave him a thumbs up and went back to her office. Knowing the university administration, they wouldn’t bother sending anyone for at least a few weeks. That gave her some time to continue her research, hopefully figure out how to send Sappho and Muršili back and close the passage behind them, and if the worst came to the worst, intercept any more newcomers. Which had better not happen.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she mouthed to the painting of Hermes psychopomp she had as her computer wallpaper. ‘Don’t you even contemplate it.’

When Elza left her office that evening, she found Sappho and Muršili waiting for her in the ground floor hallway, sitting with their backs against the wall and taking selfies. Muršili looked remarkably normal in his trousers and sweatshirt, provided you didn’t look at his feet, which were wearing fluffy red slippers with a reindeer face on each tip. Elza gave Sappho a questioning look.

‘They were the cheapest shoes they had,’ said the poet.

‘That is because they are not shoes,’ Elza sighed. ‘They are, uh, indoor shoes. For Christmas.’

Sappho frowned.

‘Who is Christmas?’

‘Later,’ Elza said. ‘Let’s go.’

She led them both out of the building and to the bus stop, hoping nobody would notice Muršili’s footwear. Thankfully, the streets were mostly dark and empty. Muršili barely flinched at the passing cars. Sappho must have warned him about them.

‘He knows two or three words in Greek,’ the poet said as they walked. ‘I taught him a few more, and a little bit of German too.’

‘Good,’ said Elza. At least her time-travellers were good at languages. Sappho herself had been picking up on basic German phrases since her arrival, one month ago, and had been using them proudly whenever possible. Her fear of modern things was mostly gone now. Mostly. Escalators still confused her, and she still screamed when bread popped out of the toaster, though to be fair, modern people did that too.

The bus pulled up along the footpath, and Elza pointed out the door to Muršili. He walked into it head first. Elza lifted her eyes to the sky. Lucky her. Just when Sappho was starting to become less of a concern, she had been handed another ancient person to explain the concept of glass to.

Leading Muršili to a bus seat, Sappho trailing behind them and giving a disarming smile to the other passengers, she rummaged through her bag and finally pulled out a packet of tissues. She pressed it to Muršili’s bleeding nose. He thanked her – presumably – and held it in place. At least he wasn’t a complete idiot.

Four tissues later, they were home, and Sappho set to making tea – or rather, set to watching the electric kettle with wonder until it boiled, as she’d done every time since figuring out how it worked – while Elza sat Muršili down on the sofa, then went looking for her old Hittite textbooks. Her father had been skeptical when she’d insisted she was taking them to Germany. ‘You never know when you might need a Hittite grammar,’ she’d retorted. This wasn’t exactly how she’d expected ‘when’ to look, but the fact remained she was right. Hittite grammars _were_ useful.

She dropped the pile of books and class notes down onto the crate she used as a coffee table and leafed through them. The first thing she had to do was establish whether Muršili had come the same way as Sappho, and from the same place. The second was to get him to tell her, as best he could, whatever he knew about what was causing this. The third, her scholar’s mind whispered, was to compare Muršili’s experience of the Underworld to Sappho’s and study any parallels between their conceptions of life after death, as well as whether they reflected the picture given by extant sources – but that could wait. There was a time for academic research, and this wasn’t it.

She placed a blank sheet of paper on the crate, and a pen in Muršili’s hand.

‘You,’ she said, reading from the grammar. ‘Before. Where?’

She pointed at the paper, then sketched a man to make sure she was getting the message across.

‘You,’ she repeated and indicated the sketch. ‘Where?’

Something clicked in the Hittite’s face. Struggling to hold the pen – he held it like he was pointing at something, in which Elza assumed to be the position for writing cuneiform on clay – he scribbled what looked like grass. He said a word. Elza searched for it in her dictionary. Meadow.

‘You on meadow?’

Muršili confirmed. He said something else, tapping the picture that represented him. Elza went through the dictionary again.

‘God? What?’ She tried to switch back to Hittite. ‘You… god?’

‘I god,’ he said. He clutched his throat, made a guttural sound and closed his eyes. Elza realised he was mimicking dying. ‘Then god,’ he said, opening his eyes and looking at her.

A distant bell rang in her mind. Yes, of course – Hittite kings, when they died, claimed to become gods. That proved that he had come from a similar place as Sappho had. And that, like her, he had somehow been brought back to life.

‘You god –’ back to the vocabulary list – ‘now?’

Muršili clapped his hands together. Nothing happened. He clapped them again.

‘Not now,’ he said.

That had to be a disappointing downgrade. Still, for Elza, it was a positive point. She didn’t know how she would deal with an actual god on her hands.

Sappho came back then, carrying three cups of tea which she placed on top of the pile of books. Muršili picked his up, took a sip, frowned, then nodded approvingly. Sappho plopped herself down next to him on the sofa.

‘Have you learned anything useful?’ she asked.

‘Not much,’ Elza said. ‘He lived as a god in a meadow. That’s all, so far.’

‘Ask him if he knows why he came back.’

Elza spent a couple of minutes leafing through the vocabulary list, only for the Hittite to shake her head at her question. He didn’t know. Well, she could do without that answer – what mattered most was sending him back. She pointed at the picture of the meadow.

‘From here –’ she pointed at Muršili next, cross-legged on the sofa – ‘to here. You. How?’

He shrugged and said something, palms up, as if it was obvious. Then, seeing as it wasn’t obvious to Elza, he picked up the pen again and drew a path barred by a series of lines, and on each line, a gate. Elza counted them. There were seven in total. After wracking her brain for a moment and remembering nothing, she fished her phone out of her pocket and googled ‘seven gates underworld hittite’.

Now that was interesting. The seven gates of the Underworld seemed to be a Sumerian concept, drawn from a myth about the goddess Inanna’s descent. If the Hittite afterlife featured them, then it had to be connected in some way, if not identical, to the Mesopotamian one. Elza blew on her tea thoughtfully. How many Underworlds were there, really? Was Muršili’s meadow connected to the asphodel meadow? That would explain why she had been saddled with two people from theoretically different afterlives.

Better than that – if it was all the same, if all Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean dead people came and went the same way, then a _katabasis_ ritual from any of those cultures could send Sappho and Muršili back. Elza nearly dropped her teacup in excitement. She hadn’t had any luck finding appropriate Greek sources over the last month, but this opened up a whole new world of possibilities. There might be a Hittite text with just the ritual she needed. Her own Hittite was bad, but…

But what a happy coincidence, she was the one person on the planet who could ask an actual, flesh-and-blood Hittite for help.

‘Here again,’ she said and indicated the meadow. ‘Ritual. You know?’

Muršili nodded, and her heart leapt. She looked up his words as he spoke. He didn’t know the procedure himself, but he knew its name, and he could recognise it in a text. Elza slammed the dictionary shut, startling him, and turned to Sappho. The poet raised a curious eyebrow at her.

‘This is what we will do,’ Elza said in Greek. ‘You will keep playing music to earn money and feed us all. Meanwhile, I will find every Hittite ritual in the library, copy them, and make Muršili study them, until he finds what we need to send you both back.’

‘You want to use a king as a slave,’ said Sappho, ‘to do research for you.’

‘Not a slave.’ Not exactly. Just free, Hittite-speaking labour. And potentially some bonus comparative sources for her thesis. ‘He will be a… helper.’

‘A helper, sure. What do you think about that, Muršili?’

Muršili looked up from his cup of tea, somewhat uncertain. Sappho repeated her question more slowly. He struggled to answer in Greek, in a thick accent Elza could barely understand.

‘I not know. I not know where am. Why here. I…’ He said a word in Hittite.

‘Confused,’ Sappho said.

‘I confused. Am god, then am here. I not know.’

Elza’s sympathy for him returned. She’d be overwhelmed, too, if she was in his situation.

‘We will talk about it tomorrow,’ she said. ‘For now, I’ll cook dinner. Sappho, you can entertain him.’ She tidied the books into a pile and stood up. Feeding Sappho and letting her sleep had helped; hopefully the same would be true of Muršili.

Sappho fetched the ukulele she had bought herself and played songs while Elza made pasta, and Muršili sat with his chin in his hand and listened. Despite everything, Elza bit back a smile at the sight. The two of them got along well. She wondered if they’d stay friends once they’d gone back to Hades, and if that was even possible. If not, at least they could enjoy life together for another week or two.

Convincing the Hittite king to look for _katabaseis_ wasn’t so difficult, in the end; after a couple of days, and a lot of explanations about what was going on, he gladly took to research. Like Elza, he was naturally curious, and had the kind of mind that would’ve made him a good postgraduate candidate if he’d been born in a society where postgraduate studies existed. He figured out how to use a laptop much faster than Sappho did – not that Sappho cared enough to be jealous. She was content just taking selfies and showing them to Elza every evening, which, all in all, was a good thing. If there was one modern invention Elza didn’t want her finding out about, it was Instagram.

But the more time went by, the more Elza had to admit her not-dead-dead-people were settling into modern life – and worse, she was settling into having them in hers. She enjoyed their lunches together. She spent her bus rides to university looking up electricity, and cars, and the history of rubber bands, so she could better answer their questions. She stopped telling Claudia about them, resolving to keep this new part of her life hers only. She didn’t even startle when, one night, she got up to pee and almost walked into Muršili standing by the window and worshipping the moon.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, half asleep, before realising just how ridiculous this was and how she should definitely not be treating it like a casual everyday occurrence. She started to laugh.

‘Shush,’ Muršili said and pointed at Sappho. The poet stirred on her blow-up mattress on the living room floor. Elza bit her lip. A few moments later, Sappho was back to sleeping deeply.

‘Moon is sacred in land Ḫattuša,’ Muršili said. He bowed in front of the window again. ‘People here not know.’

His Greek was improving, enough that Elza could understand him without too much trouble. She imitated his bow awkwardly. Best not to disrespect his belief. He was, after all, a king.

‘My wife loved moon,’ Muršili said, straightening up again. ‘Moon was sacred her. Big deity her.’

‘She was devoted to the moon?’

‘She was.’

Elza supposed someone had to be. And, after all, why not? At least the moon didn’t resurrect random ancient people in university basements, which was the basic standard of decency for any deity. It just controlled the tides and minded its own business several thousand kilometres away from the Earth.

‘I long for wife,’ Muršili said.

‘Were you in the meadow with her?’

‘I was.’ He paused. ‘It is strange. When I lived, every day I longed for meadow because of wife. Now, am dead, and long… not for meadow. I long for wife, very, but I long also for sun, and bread and water. In Ḫattuša I had life and wanted death. Here I have death and want life.’

Elza glanced at him. He stared out the window, face pale with moonlight and eerily thoughtful. She tapped her fingers on the windowsill and wondered what to say, or if she should even say anything. Why did both he and Sappho have to be so poignant? She wasn’t qualified for this.

‘You still have a little more life here to enjoy,’ she said. ‘And then you can be with your wife again. I’m sure she will be glad to see you.’

‘I will tell her much.’

Yes, Elza thought, there sure would be a lot of stories to tell.

‘She will laugh when I say what you know on Ḫattuša. You know so small, and much is wrong,’ Muršili smiled.

‘Wait, what? We understood things wrong?’

‘Much. You fix tablets wrong. Pieces are wrong. You read names wrong. I try to fix. Wife will laugh when I will say it. She will say: you always try to fix.’

‘Let me get this straight. Scholars have made incorrect joins and read signs wrong? And you have been correcting them while you read?’

‘It is true.’

Elza let out a laugh. That was an article she would be forced to publish, and have absolutely no explanation for. She imagined herself defending it at a conference. Sorry, Hittitologists, half your work is wrong. I was told this by a Hittite king wearing Christmas slippers in my living room at 3am.

She pressed her hand to her mouth and nose to cover a snort.

‘Go to bed, both of you,’ Sappho muttered, pulling her blanket over her head.

‘Keep up the good work,’ Elza whispered to Muršili. ‘It will be useful.’

She patted him on the shoulder as she made her way to the bathroom. Flicking the light switch on, she caught herself still smiling. Well, she had a right to be. Whatever mess she’d been flung into, it was going better than she would’ve thought possible.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad having two not-dead-dead-people around.

Maybe she really could be okay with this.

*

‘The mortal woman is surprisingly fine with the situation,’ Hermes said.

Prometheus ducked into the cave, following the Trickster down the path to Hades. Asklepios’ snake flicked its tongue warily at the growing darkness. Prometheus scratched its head to reassure it. They wouldn’t be down long; just long enough to meet with Ištanu, discuss their progress and decide on a next step, then they would be back to innocently sitting around on Olympos.

‘Our poet and her kingly friend are coping well, too,’ Hermes continued. ‘By Zeus, Fire Thief, this might actually work out to our advantage.’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been tagging along all this time without believing it could work.’

‘I’m Lord of Games. Risky bets with high stakes are my jam.’

‘You’re ridiculous.’

‘Not as much as your scheme.’

‘Have you heard from Asklepios lately?’

‘He still can’t figure out where his rod went. Last time I saw him, I suggested one of the Aśvins might have borrowed it for a joke. Apollon suspects me, but he’s Apollon. That’s what he does.’

‘And Zeus? Does he suspect anything?’

‘You would know if he did.’

Prometheus slid down a boulder and onto the riverbank. That much was true. If Zeus had even the slightest hunch the Titan was working on an independent project, he’d be put in shackles in no time. So much for benefiting humanity.

Hermes strode along the river, holding his caduceus in front of him as if to part the shadows. The darkness grew thicker, yet oddly brighter, near the cave wall just behind a bend. That was a telltale sign the Sungoddess of the Netherworld was already there and waiting.

Hermes reached the bend, and abruptly stopped. Prometheus almost walked into him.

‘Ah,’ said the Trickster, ‘shit.’

‘Hail, my lord,’ said a voice that wasn’t Ištanu’s.

Two goddesses stood there, one with a sword at the throat of the other’s. The one who had spoken raised her head, her black hair rippling in locks elegantly twisted with gold and piled up above her temples, and she parted her lips into a fierce smile. Something stirred at her feet. The ichor in Prometheus’ veins froze. The lion stretched and bore its teeth, its gaze not leaving the Titan.

Ištanu, the sword digging into her bronze skin, gave them both an apologetic look.

‘Any last words before I denounce you to the heads of your pantheons?’ said Inanna.


	5. Chapter 5

‘I can explain,’ Hermes said.

Inanna narrowed her eyes.

‘No need to worry about that. Your actions speak well enough for themselves. Going against the order of nature to resurrect your pet mortals? Stealing another deity’s prerogative? Roping another pantheon into your trickery? It seems clear as day to me.’

‘My lady,’ Hermes said with a diplomatic flourish of the hand, ‘there has been a misunderstanding –’

Inanna dug the sword deeper into Ištanu’s throat. Ichor pearled on the blade. Prometheus, trying to look inconspicuous behind the Trickster, wondered if Hittite deities could die. He hadn’t exactly had much freedom to chat with them and find out.

‘There has been no misunderstanding,’ Inanna said. ‘I know you, Lord Hermes, and the words that leave your lips are all more poisonous than a serpent’s venom. Don’t lie. Follow me quietly, and your fate might not be so terrible.’

Hermes turned his caduceus over in his hands, obviously trying – and failing – to find an escape. Prometheus took a careful step backwards. Time to get out of here. It might not be honourable to abandon the Trickster to Inanna, but he didn’t have a single doubt Hermes would’ve done the same to him.

The lion growled.

‘You too, Prometheus,’ Inanna said. ‘Don’t think I haven’t seen what you’re holding.’

Prometheus clutched the rod of Asklepios to his stomach – more precisely to his liver, which he was rather protective of these days.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.

‘Why do you think?’ Inanna returned. ‘I, of all deities, should know that what goes down does not come back up. My sister hung me up and killed me for descending through the seven gates. That you three take such a rebirth so lightly, and offer it to mere mortals –’ she wrinkled her nose – ‘is more than an insult.’

Ištanu spoke for the first time, her voice choked by the blade.

‘Then why not make us pay the price here? Why lead us back to the heads of our pantheons?’

‘Justice must be served properly.’

‘You want to take credit,’ said Prometheus. ‘Don’t you? You want your power to be recognised.’

‘Enough, Fire Thief. Now come.’

‘You’re like us,’ Ištanu said. ‘Forgotten by the world. Reduced to an archetype. You long for the days of your greatness.’

‘Mark my words,’ Inanna said, ‘they will return. You three are just the beginning.’

Hermes tossed a lock of hair out of his face and gave a charming smile.

‘You won’t get the recognition you deserve for this. Look at us. We’re a joke. However revolutionary our plan is, we’re just a trickster, a bird’s hors d’oeuvre and a sun going through a goth phase, who got bored and tried to stir things up. Zeus and Tarḫuntaš will laugh, throw us to Tartaros and wherever naughty Hittites go, and forget about it all by tomorrow.’

Inanna pursed her lips.

‘This isn’t how you’ll become great again,’ Hermes said. ‘It’s not the Gods you need. It’s the mortals.’

‘I’m not joining your plot.’

‘Why not? Just imagine it. We bring back one of your devotees. He inspires the masses to your worship. New temples are built. Uruk is resettled. The Gods of all pantheons have no choice but to bow down before you. Just pull a Yahweh, and you won’t need to do any of the work yourself.’

Prometheus shook his head desperately, but Hermes ignored him. This was not good. Not good at all. They were nowhere near ready for revolutionary changes – Sappho had barely been on Earth for two months, and Muršili for one. Hermes was about to sabotage everything. Prometheus had to interrupt before –

‘Very well,’ Inanna said. ‘It’s worth a try. But if this gets out of hand, you three are taking the blame.’

‘Agreed,’ Hermes said.

Inanna sheathed her sword. Ištanu gasped for air, massaging her throat. Prometheus glared at the Trickster, who kept on ignoring him.

‘I will fetch my devotee,’ Inanna said. ‘My lion will stay here. Don’t try anything while I’m gone, or you’ll regret it.’

She spun on her heels in a billow of red and purple robes. As soon as she was out of earshot, Prometheus turned to Hermes.

‘By the Styx itself, what was that about? Do you have no idea what’s at stake? You just –’

‘I just saved your skin, Fire Thief, which is more than I could say about you. What were you doing, trying to creep away behind my back? Aren’t we partners in this?’

‘As if _you_ ever cared about _me_.’

‘Is this about your liver? Is that it? Look, I was just executing orders, there’s no need to hold a million-year-old grudge –’

‘You don’t take this seriously. You’ve never taken a single thing seriously since you emerged giggling from a cave and decided stealing Apollon’s cows would be a fun heist.’

‘You’re one to talk, you and your covering bones with fat to fool Zeus antics.’

‘I did it for a reason, because I care about humanity, unlike some people –’

‘Some people? Why do you think they call me Friend of Man –’

‘Will you two shut up?’

Ištanu glared at them, pressing a thumb to her throat leaking ichor.

‘For better or for worse, it’s done. It’s over. Inanna is bringing someone back. Now we can either work together with what we have, or we can bicker until some less persuadable deity turns up or one of our mortals slips out of our sight. This is about more than your old rivalry. We are here to help humanity. To salvage it before our siblings decide to get rid of it once and for all. Or have you forgotten that?’

Prometheus sighed. He loosened his grip on the rod of Asklepios.

‘Fine. You’re right. But if we are to work together, we really have to work together. We need to keep a close eye on this devotee Inanna is bringing back. If she does anything too ostentatious, it’s up to us to mitigate the consequences. We can’t let this get out of hand.’

‘We won’t,’ Hermes nodded.

Prometheus shot him a burning look. ‘And no more decisions without consulting the rest of us first. We’re a team. It’s time we started acting like one.’

‘You said it first, Titan.’

Prometheus ignored his grin and walked over to sit on a rock. He petted Asklepios’ snake, focusing on its soft scales and sweet face to calm himself down. Next to Ištanu, the lion yawned.

He hoped this wouldn’t be a complete catastrophe.

*

It was Sappho who found the woman.

Elza, on the other hand, found out when she unlocked her apartment door at 9:30pm, three days before Christmas, to discover Muršili and a stranger chatting on the sofa, and Sappho immediately hurrying over to explain. The poet wrung her hands nervously. Elza sighed and started taking off her shoes.

‘What happened now?’

‘I came to the academy to meet you after your work,’ Sappho said. ‘I thought I would check the basement, just in case, and I found her there. Her name is Enḫeduanna and she is from Ur, which is near Babylon. I don’t speak her language, but Muršili does. He says it is called _akkadû_. Enḫeduanna is devoted to a deity like Aphrodite, and she writes songs for her like I do…’ She interrupted herself. ‘I would have come upstairs and told you, but I thought it would be easier to just take her home and deal with her here. I’m sorry for not warning you.’

Elza put her shoes by the door and straightened up.

‘Does she understand what happened?’

‘She remembers as much as Muršili and I do. He is explaining the situation to her now.’

Elza glanced over at the woman on the sofa. She had a severe, serious face with brown skin and dark hair pinned into a bun, and she wore the nightgown Sappho had given her as if it were a royal dress. She seemed remarkably calm, all things considered. Maybe because, unlike the other two, she’d been lucky enough to be met by a fluent speaker of her language.

For the first time, Elza surprised herself by not panicking. She knew what to expect by now, and with Sappho and Muršili’s help, it couldn’t go much worse than it had before. There was just one problem. A tiny little one.

‘You know I am leaving for Christmas tomorrow,’ she said.

Sappho frowned. ‘Christmas?’

‘The winter festival. The one I spend with my family every year.’

‘Oh!’ Sappho nodded, remembering. ‘Of course, we will take care of her. We will do everything you told us to do, and tell her to do the same. Don’t worry about us, Elza. You can enjoy your festival.’

‘And leave you alone with a Mesopotamian priestess?’

‘We will take care of her, please don’t worry.’

Sappho held her gaze, honest. Elza did trust her – she had long debated whether or not to leave them for Christmas, but both the poet and Muršili had adapted well enough to the modern world by now, and they had her phone number if necessary. They would probably spend the five days she’d be away playing the ukulele and watching cat compilations on YouTube, something Muršili had recently stumbled across. Even the arrival of this new woman couldn’t throw things out of whack too much, especially if she and Muršili shared a language. Letting them sort this out alone couldn’t be too much of a mistake… right?

It was a mistake.

It didn’t seem so at first, when Sappho woke Elza up with a cup of tea the next morning and waved her goodbye at the door. By the time the plane landed in Warsaw, Elza had all but forgotten what she’d left behind. A selfie on Christmas Eve confirmed that all was going well: Sappho, Muršili and the new woman crowded into the frame, smiling and nibbling Lebkuchen hearts against the backdrop of the Christmas market. Elza switched her phone off and put it back in her pocket. Finally, she would be able to enjoy some time with her family in peace. Like a normal person.

On Christmas morning, she sat in on the living room carpet with a plate of pierogi, the television babbling in the background, and chatted about her work with her grandmother. Her two-year-old nephew drove a truck over his sister’s legs, and Elza’s father dozed next to them on the sofa, unaware of the legos they’d stacked, giggling, on his chest. Elza’s mother went back and forth from the kitchen, refilling glasses. She asked Elza if she wanted more pierogi. Elza nodded.

‘Hey,’ her mother said on her way back with a full plate, ‘that’s your town on the news.’

Elza looked up. Sure enough, that was the main square, with its cathedral she’d walked past so many times. The coverage changed to a shaky, hand-held camera showing the inside of the cathedral. Elza struggled to hear what the presenter was saying, over the sound of her niece singing Lulajże Jezuniu for what had to be the fifteenth time in a row.

‘Can you turn the sound up?’

Her mother reached for the remote. Just then, the camera zoomed in, and Elza almost dropped her plate. A man with long, dark hair was running down the aisle, followed by two women then an elderly man with a poodle. Their faces, even blurred by movement, were unmistakeable.

‘… midnight service, an immigrant woman tried to steal a service-goer’s dog,’ said the presenter indifferently. ‘Witnesses claimed she was reciting some kind of incantations in a foreign language and even pushed the pastor out of the way to take his place. She fled the scene with two people whom she is believed to be associated with. Local police have not yet managed to track her down. The incident has raised new questions about immigration laws and integration…’

‘What a bizarre thing to do,’ Elza’s grandmother said. ‘Steal someone’s dog at a Christmas service.’

‘Way to make it memorable, at least,’ said Elza’s cousin.

Elza pinched the bridge of her nose, doing her best not to swear out loud. She felt for her phone in her pocket.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said.

In the hallway, she dialled Sappho’s number and frantically tapped her fingers against the wall until finally, after what felt like far too long, the poet picked up. Elza didn’t wait for her to speak.

‘What the hell did you think you were doing? I told you to keep a low profile. Stealing someone’s dog –’

‘Elza, I’m sorry, it was Enḫeduanna, we didn’t expect her to –’

‘You said you would take care of her.’

‘We did, I promise, it was all fine until last night. We heard music in the temple and we went in to listen. Enḫeduanna thought the man’s dog was the sacrifice, and she tried to help. She said the priest was doing everything wrong.’

‘Of course he was, this was a Christian service, not Mesopotamian.’

‘I’m sorry, Elza. We all are.’

Elza leaned her head back against the wall.

‘At least tell me you were not followed home.’

‘No, we were lucky.’

‘Good.’ She relaxed, just a bit. ‘Stay there until I return. Only leave if you must, to buy food or if there is some emergency. I will be back in two days. Do you understand?’

There was a silence.

‘I understand. Sorry.’

‘Behave and you won’t need any more apologies.’ She hung up.

Back to reality – or whatever her life these last two months could be called. Christmas or not, it seemed like she couldn’t let these idiots out of her sight. She sighed and promised herself to keep her phone on from now on, until she got back and could take matters into her own hands again. However loveable her not-dead-dead-people could be, Muršili had better find the ritual to return them to Hades soon.

He met her at the airport gate, long hair hidden under a hat and an uncomfortable look on his face. Elza scanned him for anything out of place, but thank God, he looked normal. He was even wearing proper shoes.

‘We must talk,’ he said, taking her suitcase.

‘Oh boy do we need to,’ Elza muttered.

‘Not that,’ Muršili said. ‘Or, that, but also other thing.’

‘Don’t tell me something else has happened.’

‘Nothing has happened. But… there is thing with Sappho. I must talk you about it.’

Elza stepped onto the escalator leading down to the train. She waited for Muršili to speak, wondering what terrible news he was about to share and whether she should just get back on the plane to Warsaw and start a new life as a potato farmer.

‘You know Sappho loves women,’ said Muršili.

‘Everyone knows that.’

‘I think she loves Enḫeduanna.’

Elza tripped off the escalator.

‘What?’

‘Always she is with her. She not refuses anything. Enḫeduanna wanted to hear music, so Sappho with her went into temple. Enḫeduanna wanted precious blue stone, so Sappho bought… I not know word, rope for neck.’

‘Sappho bought Enḫeduanna a lapis lazuli necklace?’

‘She did. With Enḫeduanna she is like child. I am happy she is happy, but… it not is good thing. Enḫeduanna not wants to live like people here. She has strong heart. She wants change. And if Enḫeduanna wants change, Sappho wants also.’

‘They have only known each other for six days.’

‘That is love.’

That is ridiculous, Elza thought, but said nothing. A train glided into the station. She and Muršili boarded.

‘So what do you suggest we do now?’

‘I not know.’

‘Are you any closer to finding the ritual we need to send you back?’

‘I not think so. Most you gave me texts are things for temple. They say, in temple you put this and this and this. Not what to do in ritual.’

‘Keep looking. You are doing well.’

Muršili gazed out the window at the snowy landscape and didn’t answer. He wasn’t keen on returning to the meadow yet, Elza could tell. Well, too bad for him. She liked having him here too, but enough was enough. A near-sacrificed poodle was one thing; a near-sacrificed poodle because Enḫeduanna was too wilful, Sappho was too lovestruck to care, and neither of them had the common sense to guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, was quite another. The game had been fun while it lasted, but now it would have to end. Even if the gods themselves disagreed.

‘Mark my words,’ she mouthed in Polish. ‘Hermes, if you exist and you’re behind this, which you probably are because I don’t know any other chthonic deities with this sense of humour, you’re going to take these three back. Whether you like it or not.’

‘Oh,’ Muršili said, cutting her off, ‘other thing. You give me phone?’

She put it reluctantly in his hand, and he painstakingly typed a word into the browser. He tapped the first link. A song started up, followed by a video Elza knew all too well.

‘What are you doing,’ she said. It wasn’t even a question.

‘It is cat,’ Muršili said. ‘In bread.’

Elza gave him a blank, dead stare.

‘It says nyan,’ Muršili said. ‘Why?’

Elza let her head fall against the window.

Honestly, if Hermes had kicked these people out of the Underworld, she understood why.


	6. Chapter 6

On New Year’s Eve, Elza woke up to a Hittite king shaking her and holding up a sheet of paper.

‘Do you never sleep?’ she groaned and buried her head under the pillow.

He lifted the pillow away. She groaned louder.

‘I have ritual,’ he said.

Elza rubbed her eyes.

‘Ritual for wha… Wait. You have the ritual we need? Really?’

‘I have. I found it now. I, uh…’ He paused. ‘You want first good thing or bad thing?’

Elza sat up, combing her fingers through her hair. That was promising. Not.

‘The good thing. I just woke up.’

‘Good thing is ritual is easy. We can do it. We not need much.’

‘And the bad thing?’

‘Small dog must die.’

‘We are _not_ sacrificing a puppy, Muršili.’

The king shrugged. ‘For ritual, it must be so. It is not my decision.’

‘That’s fine for you to say. You won’t have to deal with the consequences of stealing a puppy and murdering it in the basement of a public building. Believe it or not, I would rather not go to prison.’

‘What is prison?’

‘Where I will spend the next few years if we do as you say.’

She got up, pushing past Muršili, and made her way into the living room. The early morning sun filtered through the blinds. Sappho and Enḫeduanna were still asleep on the blow-up mattress, sharing a blanket, hands entwined. Elza had to admit they were kind of cute.

‘Is there really no other way?’ she whispered. ‘The Greeks could substitute animal-shaped cakes for animals. Can’t you Hittites do that?’

‘Maybe it will work not so well.’

‘But it could work?’

‘It is what poor people do in land Ḫattuša.’

‘Then,’ Elza said, ‘we will be poor Hittites, because there is no way we are sacrificing a puppy.’

She opened the kitchen cupboard, searching for ingredients. She was in luck: she still had some eggs, flour and butter, and even a bit of milk. No sugar, but it didn’t exist in the ancient world anyway. She put the ingredients on the bench, took a slice of bread, and closed the cupboard.

‘Looks like you are going home tonight,’ she said.

‘We are going home?’ said Sappho’s voice.

She sat up on the mattress, eyebrows puckered, still disheveled from sleep. Muršili held up the paper for her to see.

‘I found ritual,’ he said.

‘But it’s so soon…’

‘It’s been over two months,’ said Elza.

Sappho glanced at the still-sleeping Enḫeduanna, and Elza realised what she meant. She took a bite out of her slice of bread, not sure what to say.

‘Please, Elza,’ said Sappho, standing up, ‘can we stay one more night? Just one.’

Elza looked down. Sappho walked over to clasp her hand.

‘Please try to understand. We are alive now. We feel the warmth of the sun. Our eyes see, our hearts beat, and our souls love. Soon we will be shadows again among endless asphodels. But not yet.’ She turned towards Enḫeduanna. ‘Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful? What would you not give for someone like that? How many chariots and iron-clad soldiers are worth just one more day of life in her arms?’

‘I know you love her –’

‘More than that.’ Sappho’s grasp tightened. ‘I love that I can feel its warmth in my cheeks and its flutter in my breast. I am alive, Elza, and I want just a little bit more of it. Please. You said there is a festival tonight and the sky will be full of lights. Let us see it. If death is forever, it can wait one day more.’

Elza looked into Sappho’s eyes, bright with tears. God, she really was in love. Elza had never been in the poet’s shoes, but seeing her face, it was hard not to imagine how it must feel. Sappho was finally living again, just the way she wanted to, and Elza was about to take it away from her.

No. She couldn’t be so harsh. She nodded.

‘Fine. One day. But you will not leave the house. You can watch the lights from the window.’

Sappho beamed. Leaving her to wake Enḫeduanna up, Elza fetched her phone and googled an easy cake recipe. Best to bake the puppy now, so everything would be ready to go tomorrow – and so Sappho wouldn’t be able to delay any longer.

Muršili helped her with the baking, telling her about his corrections to the tablets in broken Greek mixed with Hittite, and laughing as they tried to make the dough into something vaguely dog-shaped. From time to time, Elza looked across the bench at him – she had to, to remind herself she wasn’t dreaming. In ten years, she would have to remember this moment. She really had spent a couple of months living with historical figures straight out of her textbooks. Even now, right now as it happened, she struggled to believe it. Here she was, with a three thousand-year-old king. Yet with his unwashed, unbrushed hair and flour on his nose, he could have been anyone.

Once the cake was baked and put in the fridge, they had lunch, then listened as Sappho and Enḫeduanna took turns playing songs on the ukulele. In the mid-afternoon, Elza excused herself to take a nap. If she was going to stay up to see the fireworks at midnight, she would need some rest. She texted Claudia briefly – ‘hope you have a fun evening, got anything planned?’ – then lay down and closed her eyes.

When she woke up, Sappho and Enḫeduanna were gone.

All their belongings had vanished from the living room, as had the ukulele and, Elza realised with a curse, the door key. She checked the door; it was locked. Only Muršili’s shoes were still there. Hearing noise in the bathroom, she burst in, then promptly backed out when she glimpsed the Hittite – alone – in the shower.

‘Muršili,’ she shouted through the door. ‘Get out. The poets ran away.’

He emerged a minute later, a towel around his waist. Elza looked away. Not that this was the first time she’d seen him half naked; come to think of it, she’d seen more nude people over the last two months than she had in her entire lifetime. If she’d been anyone else, she would’ve enjoyed the thought, but she was Elza and she really had better things to worry about.

‘The poets ran away,’ she repeated, ‘we’re locked in, and if you tell me you had anything to do with it you’ll be the ritual sacrifice when we find them.’

‘I not knew.’

‘You didn’t notice them planning anything?’

‘Nothing.’ He walked into the living room and looked around. ‘Maybe they will return? They wanted to see lights. Maybe it is all.’

Elza doubted it. She’d seen Sappho’s face this morning, and how desperate she was. The prospect of going back to the asphodel meadow had driven her and Enḫeduanna to do exactly what Muršili had feared: something very, very stupid.

She turned her phone on and tried to call Sappho. It sent her straight to voicemail. She swore. This confirmed it.

‘Get dressed,’ she said to Muršili. ‘We need to find them.’

Once he was back in the bathroom, she shoved herself against the front door, then shook the handle. It made no difference. So much for living in a modern, secure building. She considered calling a locksmith, but at 6pm on New Year’s Eve, it would take too long, if anyone came at all. No, she didn’t have any time to spare. She had to leave the apartment and locate Sappho and Enḫeduanna – now.

Tentatively, she opened one of the living room windows and peered out. Six floors separated her from the street below. Well, it wasn’t like she had a choice. She retrieved her bag, wrapped up the cake in glad wrap and put it inside – she was _not_ missing another chance to send both women back – slipped her coat on and waited for Muršili. She checked her phone one last time. No news from Sappho, but Claudia had replied to her message: ‘I’m going to a party at Mehmet’s, want to come?’ Elza rubbed her temples. If only. ‘Sorry,’ she typed, ‘something just came up. Will explain later. Happy New Year.’

For the thousandth time, she found herself wishing she was a normal person. Someone who didn’t have an obsession with ancient civilisations to the point that they had manifested in her actual life. Someone who didn’t spend New Year’s chasing after people who were supposed to have died two to four thousand years ago.

Why hadn’t she gone to art school? Art was a normal field. No chance of portals to the Underworld there.

‘What we do now?’ said Muršili.

He was standing by the sofa, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. Elza jabbed a thumb at the window.

‘This way.’

Muršili nodded, resigned, and put his coat and shoes on. Elza considered letting him climb down first – if he fell to his death, all things considered, it wouldn’t entirely be a problem – then decided against it. She was more responsible for the situation than he was. If he was to go back to the meadow, he would go the nice way, the one that involved cake rather than brains splattered on the pavement.

She sat herself on the windowsill, legs dangling down.

‘If this is how I die,’ she said in Polish to the empty air, ‘let it be known I died spiderwomaning my way out of my own apartment to catch a pair of dead gay runaway poets.’

And with those last words, she began her descent.

*

‘Emergency meeting,’ Prometheus said, seizing Hermes by the arm and dragging him down the path to Hades.

Hermes tugged himself free and hurried after him, winged sandals squelching in the mud. Prometheus didn’t slow down. There wasn’t time. Besides, if the Trickster tripped and stumbled, it was probably an act. After guiding so many souls along this road, he knew it by heart.

‘Come on, Fire Thief,’ Hermes panted from behind him, ‘it’s not that bad. I got them out of the church thing, didn’t I? A bit of good fortune can go a long way. Give me a moment and I’ll sort this one out.’

‘You got their shenanigans broadcast internationally is what you did, and that was when you knew where they were. Do you even have any idea where they are now?’

‘It won’t take long to find out. With luck –’

‘I’m not leaving this one up to luck.’

Prometheus took a left, towards Ištanu’s meadow. He crept along the outer wall, taking care to stay in the shadows. Bats fluttered in circles above him. Asklepios’ snake wrapped itself more tightly around his arm.

‘Not to mention we agreed to make any decisions together. This turn of events absolutely warrants a common decision.’

‘Sure, whatever.’

Hermes gave his usual, disarming smile. Prometheus rolled his eyes and kept moving forward. He could see the Sungoddess of the Netherworld’s strange light up ahead; that meant she had gotten his message and was already waiting. Good. He watched the surrounding darkness for movement. Other than the bats, nothing stirred. They seemed to be alone.

Inanna stood next to Ištanu, a hand on her lion’s head. Prometheus bowed deeply. Best be as respectful as possible, given what he was about to say.

‘I hear you are displeased with my devotee’s behaviour,’ Inanna said.

Prometheus kept his eyes down.

‘She is not exactly… discreet.’

‘She was never meant to be. She was raised from the Dead to change the world.’

‘Ah, see, that’s where there was a misunderstanding. The goal here is to do things somewhat gradually. I don’t mean to deny you your worship,’ he added hastily as Inanna’s eyes narrowed. ‘But it might be best if we wait a little before going all out. Pull a Yahweh, sure, but… slowly?’

‘Yahweh did not waste time with his Messiah.’

Yahweh didn’t have to act behind someone’s back lest he be tied to a burning wheel, Prometheus thought, but just said: ‘Different Gods, different circumstances.’

‘Are you suggesting we call the plan off?’ Ištanu said. Her voice held a sharp tone. Probably disapproval.

‘Not all of it.’ Prometheus glanced up at her. ‘Your priest-king is doing fine. So can our poet, if only… if only we remove the other woman.’

The lion growled.

‘That is unacceptable,’ said Inanna.

‘It is, actually, a bit unfair,’ said Hermes. ‘Sappho will be heartbroken.’

‘I don’t mean her.’ Inanna glared at him. ‘The only reason you are not in Tartaros right now is that you agreed to let me use your methods to bring my worship back to humanity. Denying Enḫeduanna a chance is jeopardising yourselves. Either she stays, or I tell your father.’

Prometheus hadn’t been on Earth much, but he’d been near enough schools to have heard that threat before. Oddly, ‘I’m going to tell your father’ wasn’t as funny when ‘I’ was Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, and the Father was Zeus, King of pretty much everything she didn’t already own.

But unlike a schoolboy, he couldn’t just mumble an apology and go back to playing knucklebones. He was doing it for humanity – the one cause he had fought for his entire existence. Well, that and being more flamboyantly annoying than Hermes, but that wasn’t the point. This was about more than the two of them.

‘It will only be temporary,’ he said. ‘We remove Enḫeduanna, make sure the other two stay, let things settle down so they can get back to work, then bring her back. Maybe somewhere else, so she doesn’t get entangled with Sappho. I’m sure this can work out if we do it properly.’

He raised his head, giving Inanna as confident a look as he could muster. He tried not to notice the lion baring its teeth next to her. Good kitty, he thought in its direction. Nice kitty.

Asklepios’ snake constricted around his arm, even more nervous than he was.

‘If anything is to happen to my priestess,’ Inanna said, ‘anything at all, I need your word that she will be restored to her rightful position in the end.’

‘Of course,’ said Prometheus.

‘And I want you to swear than you will do nothing, when the time comes, to hinder her or me. In this new world that you are building, my temples will be the greatest.’

‘Hey,’ said Ištanu. ‘What about mine? The mortals still remember you, at least. At best, I am an obscure name in a university library catalogue.’

‘I stand by my words. You will have your share of temples, but I claim my title of Queen of Heaven and Earth.’

Prometheus met Ištanu’s eyes, then Hermes’. The Trickster gave a slight nod. He was right: they would have to pay this price. And they could still work with it. Prometheus himself barely had any temples of his own, and that hadn’t stopped him from transforming human civilisation.

Coaxing Asklepios’ snake onto the rod before it severed his forearm, he put it on the ground and held out his hand to Inanna.

‘I agree,’ he said.

Inanna took his hand. Hermes placed his own above theirs.

‘As do I,’ he said.

All three turned towards the Sungoddess. Mouth wrinkled, golden eyes burning, she took a resigned breath. She dropped her hand onto Hermes’.

‘As do I,’ she said.

‘Very well,’ said Inanna. ‘It is sworn. Prometheus, you may find and return my priestess to me.’

Prometheus bent down to pick up the rod. Then stopped. It wasn’t there.

Instead, what was there was a trail of footprints leading up to a boulder where a redheaded figure sat with a sly grin, one leg up and one leg dangling down, his elbow resting on his knee, a rod with a petrified snake twirling between his fingers.

‘’Sup, friends,’ he said.

Prometheus took a step forward. In the blink of an eye, the rod fell still. The God’s smile was gone.

‘Now that wouldn’t be wise,’ he said. ‘I recommend you stand back.’

Inanna’s lion snarled, but none of them moved. Prometheus noticed Hermes was gripping his caduceus so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. His expression, normally lighthearted, was grim.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be tied up in your son’s entrails?’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘I got bored.’ He winked at Prometheus. ‘You would know.’

‘You triggered Ragnarøk because you got bored?’

And suddenly Prometheus understood why Hermes was so tense. This was Loki. Loki, whose pantheon had bound him as punishment for killing a God. Loki, whose liberation heralded the end of the world.

The destruction of humanity.

‘Yep,’ said Loki. ‘I figured it was about time. It’s been a while.’

‘You wouldn’t do this,’ Ištanu said.

‘Bold of you to assume so, my lady.’ The rod had resumed its twirling. ‘In fact, I’m unofficially the God of doing things nobody would do.’

Similar to Hermes, Prometheus thought. Except with an extra side of destruction.

‘Nobody would give that rod back,’ the Trickster said.

Loki laughed.

‘Good try. But no. Why would I miss a chance to have some fun? We’ve got some time to spare before the final battle, and I wouldn’t want to waste it.’

‘Give the rod back,’ Inanna said, her hand clutching the lion’s mane, ‘and you will live.’

‘No, I won’t. Haven’t you read the Eddas?’ The rod danced from one hand to the other. If ever a snake could look dizzy, this one did. ‘All the more reason to enjoy the time I have left.’

‘You’re a careless bastard,’ Ištanu spat. ‘A traitor among Gods.’

‘Maybe. I am a lot of things, definition upon definition upon definition. Some of them are bound to be less than flattering.’ He grinned, showing white teeth. ‘In the end, why does it matter? The meaning of life isn’t set in stone; it depends on who you ask. So does mine.’

Before anyone could reply, he leapt up. He strolled over to the edge of the boulder, looming above the river, and glanced down. Delicately, he detached Asklepios’ snake from the rod and wound it around his neck.

‘Anyway,’ he said without turning around, ‘nice chat, but I should go. Have a good Ragnarøk.’

In the same movement, Prometheus and Hermes lunged forward. Still without looking, Loki popped the rod into his mouth. His outline blurred; then he was gone. Prometheus reached the boulder just in time to hear a splash and glimpse a salmon swimming upstream, but before he could get to the riverbank, it had vanished out of sight. He dropped down to his knees. Hermes slapped his caduceus against the boulder with a curse. Too slow, too late.

Ištanu’s voice drew them out of their brooding.

‘Get up. All is not lost. Even if Ragnarøk has truly started, none of our pantheons are affected by it. We can still save as much as we can. And the rod, at least, can still be recovered.’

‘You’re right,’ Hermes said, straightening up. ‘I will go after Loki. I know his tricks.’

Of course you do, Prometheus thought, you and him are made of the same stuff. You just happened to get the nicer share.

He almost choked at the thought. Nice. He had called Hermes nice.

‘I,’ he said, putting it out of his mind for now, ‘will find our three souls and make sure they come to no harm. The world will need them, now more than ever.’

‘Yes,’ said Ištanu. ‘Now is not the time to abandon our work. Even… even Enḫeduanna may have a place in this.’ She glanced at Inanna. ‘You and I will do what we can to counterbalance whatever Loki causes. We will meet again when he has been disarmed, and decide what to do then.’

With a nod, they parted. Prometheus made for the road up at a jog. He tried not to think of what Zeus would say when he found out what happened – as he was bound to at this point – and how much more painful this punishment would be than the last one. Prometheus would deal with it once he got there.

At least he had to admit that, however terrible the consequences, Loki had good taste in theatrics.


	7. Chapter 7

Unbelievably, Elza was still alive.

She sat at the back of the bus into town, massaging her shoulders, Muršili nursing a sprained ankle next to her. He’d tried to jump the last couple of metres to the ground, clearly forgetting he wasn’t a god anymore and his body worked like you’d expect the body of a man who spends his days reading cuneiform tablets to work. But at least he’d made it in a single piece, and so had she. She would’ve said some deity was watching over them, but considering the last couple of months, it was more likely that deity had, for once, let them be.

‘Where do you think Sappho and Enḫeduanna went?’ she asked, gazing out the window.

‘I not think far,’ Muršili said, ‘because they want to see lights.’

Of course – none of them knew the fireworks would get set off all over the world, not just in town. That narrowed the search down considerably.

‘Maybe they went to park. There they can see sky.’

‘Yes, they must be looking for somewhere with a good view.’ Elza tapped her fingers on her knee, thinking. ‘Let’s start with the park. If we don’t find them, we’ll try all the squares, and then the countryside.’

‘Good.’ Muršili pulled his sock up and lowered his foot to the floor with a grimace. Not a promising look.

‘How is your ankle?’

‘I can walk.’

‘Are you sure?’

Before he could answer, the man sitting in front of them turned around. He handed Muršili a rolled bandage.

‘Take this,’ he said in a rich voice. There was something uncanny about it; Elza couldn’t quite put her finger on what. ‘It will help. I’m sorry I don’t have anything better with me, my… medical kit just got stolen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Elza said.

The man waved his hand dismissively. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

As Muršili unrolled the bandage, the stranger leaned in closer to Elza. His eyes were a shade of brown that was almost golden.

‘My lady, if you will allow me to give you some advice…’

Elza frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t –’

‘Things are about to get very strange. Your world is about to change –’

Before she could help it, Elza burst into laughter.

‘Trust me,’ she said, ‘things have gone so far past strange that you sprouting wings or your hair turning to snakes would be just another day.’

‘Not that kind of strange,’ the man chuckled, ‘though I like the style. Hear me out. When you find the people you’re looking for, lead them home and don’t leave. Don’t try to send them away. They’ll be needed alive and safe, do you understand?’

Elza narrowed her eyes. ‘Who are you to tell me that?’

‘Someone who knows best.’

‘Who?’

‘By Zeus, just listen to me. We need you –’

He cut himself off, staring at the approaching bus stop. A man was waiting there alone, hand raised in a signal to the bus driver. The stranger turned back to Elza. His golden-brown eyes were frantic.

‘Get off now,’ he whispered. ‘I know who that is, and he _must not_ see you. Go!’

Elza opened her mouth to argue, but something compelled her to obey. She made for the back door, Muršili hobbling after her, and pressed the stop button. The man was right, this was stranger than usual – even the last two months’ usual. Keeping her head down so the man getting on the bus wouldn’t see her, she and Muršili stepped off into the night.

It was only once the bus was gone that she realised what was uncanny about the man’s voice. It wasn’t his voice. He was speaking Ancient Greek.

*

‘Good evening, Fire Thief,’ said Hades, taking a seat next to Prometheus in the bus.

‘Good evening,’ Prometheus replied in what he hoped didn’t sound too much like a squeak. ‘What are you doing up here?’

‘I am losing my Dead. I have come to find them.’ The Receiver of Many bore into Prometheus’ eyes. ‘What are you doing?’

Prometheus swallowed. ‘Riding the bus?’

‘Where?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t believe this…’ The Titan swallowed again. Time to put his wit to use. ‘I was just taking a stroll near the entrance to the Underworld, nothing much really, just passing time, when I saw Loki slip past. I thought, well, that’s unexpected, since he’s supposed to be chained up and all, and I could’ve sworn he was holding the rod of Asklepios, so I decided to investigate…’

‘Loki broke his bonds today. The first of my Dead vanished two months ago.’ Hades paused. Prometheus wondered how much of it was for dramatic effect. ‘So did the rod of Asklepios.’

‘Interesting,’ Prometheus said. ‘All the more incentive to go after Loki and find out how he pulled that off, huh?’

‘All the more incentive to warn Zeus as soon as I have figured out what is going on.’

Prometheus’ stomach flipped upside down.

‘Why don’t you just focus on your Dead? Bring back, uh, those you can find. I’ll sort out the rest.’

‘None of the Olympians trust you, Fire Thief.’

‘Maybe it’s time to start.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not.’

Prometheus gazed out the window, trying to look casual as his mind whirred with thoughts. Ixion’s wheel seemed closer and more menacing than ever. He had to find a way out of this. To both salvage his work and, as best as he could, himself. To paint himself as innocent as possible, before Zeus intervened and accused him of whatever was left.

If he found Sappho and Enḫeduanna before Hades did, reunited them with the other two, and convinced them to stay in hiding as intended, he’d have the first part. If Hermes caught Loki in the meantime and retrieved the rod, he might have the second. Might. Provided Hermes, finding himself face to face with Zeus, didn’t find a way to wriggle out of his oath and blame Prometheus for stealing the rod. Which, to be fair, was true, but –

None of the Olympians trust you, Fire Thief.

Not that that was hurtful. Prometheus didn’t trust the Olympians either, especially not ones that went by the epithet Trickster. Anyway, Hermes might not even find Loki, and if he didn’t then there was no doubt Prometheus would get the punishment for everything – up to and including freeing the entrails-bound God. No, the only way to escape the worst was to prove himself innocent on his own. And the only way to prove himself innocent was for him – not Hermes, not anyone else – to stop Loki.

If Hermes wanted to throw Prometheus under the bus, Prometheus would have to risk throwing him under it first. It was only fair. The Trickster was only nice when compared to Loki, after all, and they’d only ever been partners, not buddies, and this was a matter of survival and saving humanity.

Find Enḫeduanna and Sappho if possible, find Loki at all costs. That was the new plan.

‘Well,’ the Titan said, standing up, ‘I’ve got to go, but I’ll see you around.’

Hades lowered his brows. ‘Go where, Fire Thief?’

Prometheus snapped his fingers. A mist rose in the bus, not quite as thick as he’d wanted it to be, but it did the job. He stepped off into the street and took a few bounds to the other end of town. Perks of being a God, he thought. He’d never considered teaching that trick to the mortals, but really, if anything was a bad idea, that was it. They wreaked enough havoc without being able to hide their forms at will and travel at the speed of light.

He glanced back, but Hades hadn’t had the time to follow. Excellent.

Time for the Fire Thief to find the Rod Thief.

*

‘Excuse me,’ said someone behind Elza, ‘is this Scythia?’

She spun around. A bearded man with curly hair was walking towards her, holding a notebook. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Of course he was speaking Greek. What else would people speak in a small university town in Germany?

‘No, this isn’t Scythia,’ she said.

‘Oh good,’ said the man. ‘I’ve already been to Scythia. Would you mind telling me about this land and its culture? I see your women also wear trousers, were they inspired by the Scythians or were the Scythians inspired by them? How did you learn to build houses so tall? What names do you give Zeus and Heracles? Is there –’

‘Slow down,’ Elza said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Herodotus. Pleased to meet you. Now, as I was saying, is there a nearby temple where I could ask some questions of the priests?’

‘There are no temples here,’ Elza cut him off. ‘Where did you get your clothes? And your book?’

‘I came here through a building full of wares. Many of them I’ve never seen before. Would you care to explain what this is made of?’

He held out his notebook. It still had the price tag: 8 euros 90, from Galeria Kaufhof. That was unusual. So far all the dead people had come via the university basement, not the shopping mall.

‘How did you arrive in the building?’ she asked.

‘Some deity brought us there. I barely saw him. He told us to have fun, and vanished. Would you answer my questions now –’

‘Us? There’s more of you?’

‘Many, yes.’

Elza swore. Muršili patted her shoulder. It wasn’t much comfort.

‘So,’ said Herodotus, ‘who rules this land? Is it a democracy, an oligarchy or a tyranny? How does –’

‘Have you seen Sappho?’

‘Sappho? No, though I would have loved to meet her. It is said that her brother –’

‘He hasn’t seen her,’ Elza said to Muršili. ‘Let’s go.’

She started walking. Herodotus followed, scribbling in his notebook.

‘What character do the people of this land have?’ he continued. ‘I would expect it to be harsh on account of the cold weather. Is this perhaps Hyperborea? Is it always so cold and dark? Does –’

‘Oh my God,’ said Elza, turning around, ‘shut up. Please.’

Herodotus blinked, taken aback. Great, now she felt guilty. He just wanted to learn, and here she was, thwarting his academic ambitions.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s a tavern across the street. I’m sure the people there would love to answer your questions. But we need to go. I’m sorry.’

Herodotus nodded, thanking her, and stepped out onto the road. Elza and Muršili veered towards the park.

‘You do not want to keep with him?’ Muršili asked.

‘He’s from the shopping mall. He isn’t my responsibility.’

‘If you say so.’

A firework burst overhead, lighting up the park. Muršili halted and stared up. Blue sparks floated down above the trees.

‘Beautiful,’ he murmured.

Elza stayed quiet and let him have this moment. She remembered the first time she’d seen fireworks as a child, at Wianki in Krakow, and how amazed she’d been; it must be so much more amazing for a three thousand-year-old man.

‘Your land makes beautiful things,’ he said.

‘It does.’

‘Are you happy to live here?’

Elza shrugged. To tell the truth, she’d never taken much time to appreciate it. With all the work her PhD thesis demanded, she barely got to see Claudia and her other friends, enjoy a cup of tea and some music, and draw on the weekends. The rest of her days were spent with her nose in the Odyssey.

‘You must be happy,’ Muršili said. ‘Here are so many wonders. They are what we miss in meadow, even as gods. Wonders.’

He stepped along the path through the park. Elza followed.

‘Lights,’ he said, ‘but also just stars. Trees. Music. Breathing.’ He glanced at Elza. ‘Friends.’

She looked away. Dammit, he was being poignant again.

‘That is why Sappho and Enḫeduanna ran away,’ he said. ‘Not just because of love. Because of wonders.’

‘I know.’

‘I understand it.’

Another firework burst above them. This time it was golden, almost like the eyes of the man in the bus. Elza wondered who he was, and if he was the deity that had brought these people back to life.

For a fleeting moment, she wondered if she should thank him.

Then a shout rang out, followed by another. Muršili froze in his tracks. The voices were coming from the centre of the park, near the Biergarten. They were growing in volume and cutting each other off in a foreign language, that Elza recognised before Muršili named it.

‘Hittite,’ he said and started half running, half limping.

Elza hurried after him. They came out into an open space opposite the Biergarten, where dozens of partygoers were watching two men face off, tree branches in hand, in front of them. Muršili rushed forward. Elza grabbed his arm, pulling him back.

‘What are you doing? Who are they?’

‘My son,’ Muršili panted. ‘That is my son Ḫattušili. And my other son’s son. I must stop them –’

Elza held him back harder. She was not letting him get involved in a family feud. Not now.

‘Leave them,’ she said through teeth gritted from exertion. ‘They’re grown men. They can sort this out alone.’

‘They are saying my son stole throne!’

Your son may or may not have been a bit of an asshole, Elza thought. She’d read bits of his Apology in class, and, well, the least she could say was that he wasn’t very apologetic. Not that she would say so. Even in the best of circumstances, few people would like to find out that their youngest child caused a civil war.

‘Leave them,’ she repeated. ‘Muršili, please. This isn’t your business.’

The men were circling each other now, brandishing their branches like swords. The partygoers in the Biergarten cheered them on. Ḫattušili darted forward, the sparkly red dress he had probably found in the shopping mall flowing behind him, and brought his branch down on his nephew’s shoulder with a crack. Another firework went off and illuminated the entire park. Elza widened her eyes. Two figures stood a way off, by the trees. One of them was holding a ukulele.

‘Muršili, it’s them! The poets!’

The nephew kicked his uncle in the shin. Elza tugged at Muršili’s arm.

‘Come on!’

Reluctantly, he tore himself away from the fight. In the distance, Sappho and Enḫeduanna exchanged a look, then backed away into the trees. No – Elza would not lose them this time. Not because of two Hittites squabbling over a throne that had been gone for three millennia.

She grabbed Muršili’s hand and started running.

*

Prometheus found both Loki and Hermes on the rooftop of a building advertised as Galeria Kaufhof in welcoming green letters, under which the entrance doors were shattered and an alarm was blaring. The Titan leapt onto a nearby roof. Loki and Hermes were sparring as only Gods could, in illusions and explosions and flashes of light mirrored by the fireworks all around. Loki seemed to be winning. Good. This gave Prometheus the perfect opportunity to be a hero.

He crept across the roof until he was behind Loki, then jumped across the gap, hidden behind a mist. The redheaded God held Asklepios’ rod in his left hand. The snake, bunched up uncomfortably near the tip, flicked its tongue at Prometheus in recognition.

‘I’m coming for you, baby,’ he mouthed, then lunged forward.

Loki reacted faster than expected – but still not fast enough. The rod slipped out of his grasp, and Prometheus danced away. Loki dashed towards him. Prometheus threw the rod in the air; it arced high, high above Loki, then back down towards Hermes, who caught it deftly. Loki spun around in a whirlwind of colours and shapes that Prometheus couldn’t name. This time, Hermes didn’t have the advantage of surprise. Before he could leap away, Loki was upon him, clutching his throat.

Prometheus didn’t think. He darted at Loki, fingers crackling with fire, to get him away from the Olympian – or the rod. Whatever. The redhead shimmered and vanished. Something buzzed past Prometheus’ head. A fly. Loki had turned into a fly. Instinctively, the Titan reached out and clapped his hands.

Loki reappeared a few paces away, a look of shock and disgust on his face.

‘You tried to squash me? Excuse me? Am I a joke to you?’

‘Act like an insect, get treated like one,’ Prometheus shrugged.

In a flash, Loki had him pinned to the roof. Prometheus squirmed, to no avail. He’d forgotten just how strong a God’s grip could be. He wasn’t to blame for that, either; he hadn’t exactly sought out this kind of situation since being freed by Herakles.

What an idiot he’d been for helping Hermes. He should’ve fallen back and gone for a different approach. Gone for the rod, not the Trickster who didn’t trust him.

‘Comfortable, Prometheus?’ Loki smirked. Despite the anger in his eyes, his tone was still casual. ‘Shall I bring you some shackles and a bird?’

‘You’re one to speak. How does it feel to be tied up under a snake dripping venom onto your face?’

‘Flyting, are we? Very well. How does it feel to be the most under-appreciated God of your pantheon, who gave his own liver so mortals could figure out how to make bombs, who fought against his own brothers for a king who chained him up, and who loved humanity so much that he wept when he made them, but who was so little loved by humanity that they forgot to give him his own cult?’

‘I had an altar in Athenai, you wife of a horse.’

Desperately, he searched the rooftop for Hermes. The Trickster was nowhere in sight. Of course he wasn’t.

‘Sometimes wives have the sharp tongue men need, but lack,’ Loki sneered. He leaned in. ‘Listen to me, Prometheus. Your soft heart has led, is leading, and will continue to lead you into madness. This thing you’re doing is a mistake. Most of the things you’ve done are mistakes. It’s time you learned from them.’

Prometheus gulped. Loki’s face was a finger away from his. The God’s eyes burned with an impenetrable flame.

Then, out of nowhere, Loki lurched backwards. A skipping rope wrapped around his chest, and Hermes appeared behind him, holding a plastic handle in each hand and tying them quickly into a knot. Loki thrashed about, trying and failing to shape-shift. He swore. He was bound too tight.

‘A great thing, this, isn’t it?’ Hermes said. ‘I found it downstairs. Not quite as effective as entrails, but for less than ten euros, it was a bargain.’

‘As if you paid for it,’ Prometheus said.

‘Hey, I’m the Leader of Thieves, after all.’

Prometheus pushed himself to his feet. Both the rod of Asklepios and Hermes’ caduceus were lying a few steps away, all three snakes huddled together in fear. The Titan coaxed Asklepios’ one back onto the rod. That was that, then. Loki was captured, the rod was retrieved, and all that was left was to get the priest-king and both poets to safety. And somehow make it look like, even if Prometheus was partly responsible for this mess, he’d still saved the day.

Of course, that was what he’d do. Wasn’t it?

After a moment’s pause, he knelt back down. He picked up Hermes’ caduceus and carried it over to the Olympian.

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘for helping me out there. And from the start, really.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Hermes beamed. He took the caduceus. ‘But you might not want to speak too fast, Titan. Take a look.’

He pointed at the sky. Prometheus looked up, then wished he hadn’t. A flash of light tore through the darkness, and it wasn’t a firework. It travelled straight down in a single bolt and struck the rooftop, and Prometheus stumbled backwards. Not that he had anywhere to run or hide.

The light faded, and he was face to face with Zeus.


	8. Chapter 8

A lightning bolt zigzagged across the sky, followed almost immediately by a clap of thunder. Great, Elza thought, tripping over snowy roots and dragging Muršili behind her. Now a literal storm was coming.

Fifty metres ahead, Sappho and Enḫeduanna darted between the trees. They were gaining distance – but unlike Elza, they didn’t know where they were going. Just a few more minutes and they would be cut off by the river. Elza just had to hope they wouldn’t wade across. Getting hypothermia from chasing undead poets wasn’t her ideal way of spending New Year’s Eve.

In the distance, Sappho and Enḫeduanna slowed, then stopped. Elza sped up. Sappho turned around, saw her, and crossed her arms.

‘Before you ask,’ she shouted, ‘we are not coming with you. Muršili can die if he wants. We are going to live.’

‘That’s not the point right now,’ Elza panted.

‘It was always the point. The gods brought us back, and you want to go against them. We won’t let you. We want to see the new year, and the spring. We want to fly on an airship to Greece. We want to sing songs and learn how to put them in a box so people all over the world can listen.’

‘Not is time for this now,’ Muršili shouted back. They had almost caught up with the poets. ‘Important thing is happening. We must go.’

Sappho wrinkled her nose.

‘You side with the person who wants to send you to the meadow forever?’

‘My wife is in meadow.’ He said it as if it said everything. ‘But we will not go to there now. We met man in chariot. He told us thing is happening and we must go to Elza’s home.’

‘Muršili is right,’ Elza said. ‘Listen, I know you want to stay here, and you know I want you to go back to Hades, and we all know we’ll have to sort that out soon. But there really is something strange going on. More people have come back to life, and they didn’t come the same way as you did. The man we met in the bus spoke Greek. We climbed six floors down a wall and we didn’t even die.’

Sappho raised an eyebrow. Elza cleared her throat.

‘Anyway. I don’t know what this is about, but I do think it’s best for all of us if we keep out of it and go home. And stay there.’

Enḫeduanna said something in Akkadian. Muršili replied with what Elza assumed was a translation of what she’d just said. Enḫeduanna answered with a frown.

‘She says, in Akkad that is called to bury head in sand.’

‘In Germany,’ Elza retorted, ‘it’s called being sensible. Come on, let’s move.’

Nobody reacted. She raised her eyes to the sky.

‘Come on, seriously. If for no other reason, at least do it so we don’t stumble across Herodotus again, you have no idea how many questions that man –’

She interrupted herself. All three were standing frozen, staring at something behind her. Slowly, stomach knotted, she turned around. A man had appeared there, inhumanly tall and dressed all in black. Elza bit her lip. The man from the bus stop. He’d found them.

He looked, in a way that made even Elza’s skin crawl, dead.

Of course. What an idiot she was. Over a decade of studying Ancient Greece, and she still hadn’t thought twice before speaking the name of a chthonic deity. Mention Hades and you draw his attention. Obviously. Dumbass.

‘You will come with me now,’ Hades said. His voice was like dry leaves in the wind.

‘I don’t suppose we can outrun a god?’ Elza whispered.

‘Oh, so _now_ you want to get away,’ Sappho hissed back.

‘I told you –’

The world seemed to tip upside down. Elza took in a deep breath, ready to scream or maybe vomit, then closed her mouth. She was standing opposite the lost and found desk of a shopping mall. She blinked. The mall didn’t vanish. A green sign flickered by an escalator to her left. Galeria Kaufhof.

‘This way,’ Hades said, pointing at a staff door behind the lost and found desk.

As he spoke, a man popped up from behind the desk. He held a cash drawer entirely filled with coins. He grinned, and said something in Akkadian.

‘He says we must buy coin,’ Muršili translated.

‘The boatman will need no coins if you cross with me,’ Hades said. ‘Besides, this mortal will be coming too.’

‘He says he has best quality coins, very nice, for good price. He says they will be good… thing to remember this place.’

‘He wants to sell us a souvenir?’ Elza said.

Muršili nodded. The man held up a coin, showing the city skyline pressed into it. Elza rubbed her temples. This was it. The final stage of insanity.

‘Ea-naṣir,’ Hades growled, and oddly it sounded like both Greek and Akkadian at once, ‘if you will not put those away and follow us, I will personally provide Ereškigal with enough copper ingots to wall you up in.’

The man shrugged, still smiling his conman’s smile, and flicked his coin into the air. He caught it between his thumb and index finger. He spoke without looking up from it.

‘He asks if you can write this as complaint,’ Muršili said, ‘so he can put for his collection.’

Hades glowered. He looked about ready to strangle Ea-naṣir with his own hands.

‘I do not write complaint tablets.’

‘I can make him a Yelp page, if you like,’ said a voice. Another man, too tall to be human, stepped off the escalator and strode towards them. He pulled another deity, red-haired and tied up in a skipping rope, behind him. ‘It only takes a couple of clicks to leave a review. Modern technology makes life a lot easier, doesn’t it?’

Ea-naṣir laughed. Hades didn’t.

‘What are you doing up here, psychopomp?’ he asked.

‘Tidying up.’ The god gently pushed past Elza, holding out a winged staff to make way. Two snakes slithered over it. Elza’s heart skipped a beat. Hermes. This was Hermes.

‘This one decided to get up to some mischief,’ Hermes said, nodding at the bound deity. ‘Zeus asked me to put him back where he belongs.’

‘He is not alone in his machinations. Have you seen Prometheus?’

‘That sounds like a question you should ask Zeus.’

‘You sound like you have an answer you do not want to give.’

Elza shook herself. Okay, so she was in the presence of three immortal deities. No big deal. Totally not. The point was, two out of three of those deities were bickering – and none of them were paying attention to her or her not-dead-dead-people. She tugged at Sappho’s arm. This was their chance.

She ducked behind a display of travel guides, followed by both poets and the king. They crawled towards the escalator. Just a quick dash and they would be on the ground floor, then through the doors. Then they could make their way home – and think about what to do next.

Elza glanced back. The deities hadn’t noticed their disappearance. Good. She twisted around to look at Sappho, Muršili and Enḫeduanna.

‘Now,’ she whispered.

The four of them bolted straight for the escalator. Elza climbed the steps two by two, skidded past showcases of watches and expensive jewellery, jumped over the broken glass in the entrance and ran out, only stopping once they’d reached the corner of the street. She bent over to catch her breath.

‘I thought you wanted us gone,’ Sappho panted.

Elza glanced up at her. The poet was leaning against a shop window, with Enḫeduanna at her side. Muršili, wincing in pain, was hobbling towards them too. He’d done impressively well tonight, considering his sprained ankle.

‘I don’t want you gone,’ Elza said. ‘I never did, really. I only ever wanted to do what would make things right. Dead people are not supposed to come back to life.’

She took several gulps of air and straightened up. The three of them were watching her.

‘But you’re my friends. Despite everything, even the attempted dog sacrifice. I don’t want you in the meadow, I just want life to be… normal.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, or what those gods are up to. Right now, the most normal thing we can do is go home.’

Muršili squeezed her shoulder.

‘We are sorry that we made difficult your life.’

‘Yes,’ Sappho said, ‘we are.’ Enḫeduanna nodded along, though she probably didn’t understand a word of what they were saying.

‘All right,’ Elza said, ‘enough talking or I will get sappy. Let’s go.’

Sappho gave her a thumbs up. Muršili imitated her awkwardly. Swallowing a laugh, Elza stepped forward around the corner.

And looked straight into the sun.

Or some kind of sun, at least. She wore dark colours but she still shone, so brightly that Elza’s eyes burned. Next to her stood another goddess, just as regal and dressed in blood-red robes, and about a dozen smaller silhouettes huddled behind them – humans. Muršili made a choking noise. To the Sungoddess’ right, his son avoided his gaze.

‘Come to me, child,’ said the Sungoddess to the Hittite king. ‘You have done well.’

Enḫeduanna stood without moving, gazing with tears in her eyes at the goddess in red. After a moment’s hesitation, Sappho stepped forward and slipped her hand into her lover’s. Elza backed behind the corner. Something told her this wasn’t a time to be conspicuous.

‘My lady,’ Muršili said in Hittite, ‘what is happening?’

‘It’s a long story,’ said the Sungoddess in four languages at once, if not more. ‘All you need to know is that the heads of our pantheons have involved themselves and agreed to bring it to an end.’

‘But it is not over,’ said the goddess in red. She looked straight at Enḫeduanna. ‘We will rise again, you and I, and change the world.’

She strode forward. ‘Come,’ she said to Enḫeduanna, and held out her hand. The priestess took it.

Sappho looked from Enḫeduanna to Elza, then from Elza to Enḫeduanna. A decisive expression came over her face. She squeezed Enḫeduanna’s hand tighter.

‘May your life be normal and happy,’ she mouthed to Elza, then turned to the goddess in red and said: ‘I will help.’

Muršili was already following the Sungoddess back to the shopping mall, talking heatedly with his son and grandson. Ḫattušili seemed particularly tense. Well, that would give them something to discuss and pass time in the meadow. Bonus points if they held the conversation with Ḫattušili still in his sparkly cocktail dress.

Then, before she could help it, Elza crept after them. She had to see what was about to happen. After so many hours spent studying _katabaseis_ , she couldn’t just throw away her single chance to see a real-life one. She was a scholar, after all.

The group made their way through the entrance, down the escalator and to the lost and found desk. Elza crouched behind the travel guides, holding her breath.

‘Is everyone there?’ Hermes asked.

‘Yes,’ said the Sungoddess. ‘This was all he unleashed. To tell the truth, we were expecting worse.’

‘It was a bit anticlimactic,’ Hermes agreed. ‘Based on the Eddas, I’d envisioned more chaos. Not that I’m complaining.’ He winked at the bound deity.

‘I have one of your people,’ the goddess in red said.

A man with a curly beard and a notebook came forward. Herodotus. Hermes took a step back.

‘Oh, you can keep him.’

‘No, please,’ said the goddess. ‘Please take him.’

With what Elza could’ve sworn was an eye roll, Hermes beckoned the historian forward. Herodotus opened his mouth, pen poised. Hermes cut him off.

‘Well, with that sorted out, time to get going. We’ve got a long journey ahead of us. Uncle, will you do us the honour of opening the passage?’

Hades pressed down on the handle of the staff door. It opened to darkness. Hermes ushered everyone in, counting heads and accepting a souvenir coin from Ea-naṣir, then crossed the threshold and pulled the door shut behind him. It closed with a click.

And that was it.

Elza pushed herself to her feet and tentatively made her way to the lost and found desk. She tried the door handle. It was locked. So much for catching a glimpse of the Underworld. She sat herself on the desk, picked a coin from the cash drawer Ea-naṣir had left behind, and flipped it, feeling strangely melancholic.

In the distance, church bells began to chime, and fireworks rang out. Elza fished the puppy cake, now mostly squashed, out of her bag. She broke off a piece.

‘To old friends,’ she said out loud, ‘a happy New Year,’ and she started eating.

*

Prometheus sat with his wrists and ankles shackled in the waiting chamber to Zeus’ throne room. The weight of iron was uncomfortably familiar, and it would only go downhill from here – literally. He wondered if Ixion would make good conversation, between the screams. If so, the next million years might not be as boring as the last million, though probably just as excruciating.

He’d had the opportunity to avoid this. When Zeus appeared on the rooftop, Prometheus could have justified himself, as planned. He should have blamed Hermes in words slick with honey, so that Zeus wouldn’t guess the bones of truth underneath, and insisted that he himself had come to Earth to limit the damages. Which had had. That much was true.

But instead of giving himself credit, he had confessed. He had admitted that, except for Loki’s intervention, the whole scheme was his.

Not because Hermes had saved him or anything, and definitely not because he owed the Trickster a favour. Of course not. Prometheus would never do that. Hermes had personally left him on a mountain to have his liver devoured – they weren’t on good terms. It was a wonder they’d even managed to collaborate for so long. Prometheus had only absolved him because… Because…

He sighed. Who was he kidding? He had absolved Hermes because he liked him. Because despite everything, they got along. And if this was Prometheus’ idea, then Prometheus would shoulder the responsibility alone, even though they had called themselves a team – because he would rather go to Tartaros than betray a friend.

The door to Zeus’ throne room opened, and Ganymedes appeared.

‘The Father of Gods and men will see you now,’ he said.

Prometheus shuffled through. The room was mostly empty, apart from two figures standing on either side of the king. To the left, Hermes offered what Prometheus assumed was meant to be a reassuring smile. To the right, Asklepios glared, clutching his rod. Zeus, high above on his throne, had an impenetrable expression.

None of them spoke.

‘Happy New Year,’ Prometheus said, to break the silence.

‘Were you telling the truth,’ Zeus said, ‘when you claimed to have stolen Asklepios’ rod and resurrected mortals?’

That was straight to the point. Prometheus nodded. He couldn’t backtrack now.

‘Yes.’

‘And you also retrieved the rod after it was stolen by Loki.’

‘Well, yes.’ Prometheus shifted on his feet. The shackles clinked. ‘Him starting Ragnarøk made me regret my choices quite a bit.’

Zeus chuckled.

‘That wasn’t Ragnarøk, Titan.’

‘It wasn’t?’

‘Certainly not. Loki will be freed when Ragnarøk begins, not the reverse. This was simply a brief escapade.’ His smile hadn’t left him. ‘Not unlike yours.’

Prometheus bowed his head, not sure whether he should join in the laughter or apologise. Zeus was, as always, unreadable.

‘So Loki lied?’ he muttered. ‘It’s over now?’

‘No. Humanity is still on the brink of destroying itself, and Ragnarøk is still near. Loki will return, and far worse things will be brought about. But until then, there is something he knows that you do not.’

‘How to turn into a fish?’

Zeus frowned. So it wasn’t the time for jokes after all.

‘How to leave mortals to their own devices. You have always wanted the best for them, and I do commend that. But we cannot give them everything. Sometimes they must find their own path. What they do now, and whether it leads to their own destruction, is up to them. Not to you.’

‘You don’t mean that…’ Prometheus searched for words. ‘Are you saying Loki escaped just to point that out?’

‘I am no better at guessing Loki’s intentions than anyone else. What I am saying is that, no matter what they were, there is a lesson to be learnt from him.’

Zeus leaned forward to gaze down at the Titan.

‘Prometheus, you went against the order of nature with this scheme. You challenged death. You stole another God’s prerogative. You forced three deities, including two from other pantheons, to do your will.’

‘You traumatised my snake,’ Asklepios put in.

Prometheus grimaced. The poor thing. Out of all the things he was being accused of, giving a snake PTSD had to be the worst.

‘These acts more than warrant a place in Tartaros,’ Zeus said. ‘I told Ixion long ago that, if anything like this were to happen, I would send you down to keep him company. However –’ he paused – ‘Hermes tells me the message has already gotten across.’

Prometheus shot a glance at the Trickster. Hermes winked.

‘I have elected to keep you on Olympos,’ Zeus continued. ‘You will be under strict surveillance, and forbidden to leave under any circumstances for the next million years. I suggest you take this time to study how proper deities behave.’

Boring deities, Prometheus thought, but kept quiet. It wouldn’t be smart to sass back at the God who had just shown more mercy towards him than ever before. Best to wait a few centuries before trying anything, even small. There would be other opportunities to spice up the Olympians’ lives.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said.

At a sign from Zeus, Hermes escorted Prometheus out of the hall. They crossed the palace in silence, barely even looking at each other until they were outside. The horizon was growing pink with dawn. The two Gods started along the mountainside towards the building that would be Prometheus’ new prison.

‘Did I really traumatise Asklepios’ snake?’ he found himself asking.

Hermes snorted.

‘It’s a healing snake. It’ll be fine.’ He nudged the Titan. ‘You know, you really are too kind for your own good.’

‘You’re one to speak,’ Prometheus returned. ‘Thanks for vouching for me, though.’

‘You’re welcome. It was a good rhetorical exercise. The masters of the Thinkery would be proud.’

‘The what?’

‘The Thinkery. It’s where you learn to make the worse argument prevail over the better one. By Zeus, Fire Thief, your lack of culture is appalling. I’ll have to bring you every single one of Aristophanes’ plays and make you read them while you’re here.’ He sighed dramatically. ‘I wish we’d had time to bring Aristophanes back. That would’ve been fun.’

‘That would’ve been a terrible idea and you know it.’

Grinning, Hermes pushed the door to the building open. Prometheus walked through. For a few moments, they looked at each other across the threshold without a word.

‘Hermes,’ said Prometheus at last, ‘you will watch over the mortals while I’m here, won’t you?’

‘Always,’ said the Olympian. ‘Here’s a secret, Titan: not everything I do is a joke. It’s not for nothing they call me Friend of Man.’

With a wave, and before Prometheus could answer, he closed the door. His footsteps faded on the other side. Prometheus sat down on the bench along the wall.

So began the million-year waiting game until his next trick.

*

_Epilogue: three months later_

Claudia zigzagged through the cafe tables, holding an ice cream cone in each hand. She gave one to Elza and sat down opposite her. Elza thanked her and took a bite from it, without looking up from the sheet of paper she was working on. Lemon sorbet – nice. It was just what she needed on a warm April afternoon like this.

‘It’s good to see you drawing again,’ Claudia commented. ‘To be honest, I worry sometimes that you spend too much time on your thesis.’

‘It’s four hundred pages of research. It needs some dedication.’

‘I know. But I’m glad that you’ve been taking more breaks lately. Especially art breaks. Your pieces are awesome.’

Elza bit into her ice cream to hide a smile. She kept on shading her drawing. She wondered what Claudia would say if Elza told her it was because of a three thousand-year-old king’s advice. Make the most of life, he’d said. She’d been trying. It took effort, even more than working on her PhD, but it was going well so far. Reading Homer and establishing a geography of the Underworld was fun, and always would be. But it turned out that spontaneously meeting up with her best friend for an ice cream in the park was pretty fun, too.

‘What are you drawing?’ Claudia asked.

Elza held up the paper so she could see.

‘A woman playing the ukulele? Neat. I love her expression. She reminds me of that busker you sent me a video of, remember? It was a few months ago.’

Elza shrugged.

‘I guess she inspired the picture a bit, yeah.’

‘Cool.’

Claudia leaned back in her chair, licking her ice cream. A breeze picked up. Elza put the ashtray on the corner of her paper so it wouldn’t fly away.

‘Hey,’ Claudia said, ‘about that busker. Remember how you kept joking she was Sappho?’

Close enough – it wasn’t worth correcting her. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t you think it would be interesting if dead people really could come back to life like that? You spend so much time studying _katabaseis_. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the reverse happened?’

‘Wondered? No,’ said Elza, ‘absolutely not,’ and she kept on drawing.


End file.
